 |
| FWPD SWAT team vs.76-year-old woman. |
On the morning of Thursday, March 7th, FWPD responded to a call from employees of a tree-service company working on Central Drive. According to a local news report, those workers told police a woman in the neighborhood had threatened them.
When FWPD arrived on the scene, the woman, identified as Corrine Ann Nahrwald, a 76-year-old white woman, emerged from her home and fired a gun.
Officers returned fire, striking Nahrwald in the leg. She was eventually taken into custody and is currently hospitalized in non-life-threatening condition.
Despite the initially jarring images on local TV of a highly militarized FWPD presence outside the home of an elderly woman, I couldn't help but remember the very different police response to DaChe'na Warren-Hill a few months ago.
Hill, a twenty-year-old Black woman, was unarmed when she was shot and killed by FWPD office Mark A. Guzman in November 2023.
One has to wonder what impact implicit bias had on the FWPD response to Hill, who was fatally shot seconds after the responding officer arrived on the scene—despite being unarmed and driving away from that officer.
Nahrwald's interaction with the FWPD was quite different: despite firing a gun in the direction of multiple officers, she received a non-lethal shot in response, and—after a prolonged negotiation—was taken into custody and hospitalized for her injury.
So why was one Fort Wayne woman shown mercy and patience by the FWPD and the other a victim of a rapid extra-judicial execution? The answer might be as simple as black and white.
There's more to come in the next dispatch.
©2024 SummitCityScribe