Saw this story from April 12th from the Washington Post today, and the statistics it presents are startling. Since 2005, out of all the thousands of fatal police shootings there have been across America (and no one knows the precise number because police and other law enforcement agencies are not required to keep report these incidents) only fifty-four (54) police officers have been charged with murder in connection with the death of 49 victims.
Think about that for a moment. The study conducted by WaPo and Bowling Green State University found that, at best, this represented roughly one indictment for every one thousand fatal shooting by cops. That’s an indictment rate of .001, or to put it another way cops who shooting someone dead are indicted only .1% of the time. At best.
Those numbers are astonishingly small, but they only scratch the surface of what this study revealed. For example, read the following:
(cont. below fold)
In an overwhelming majority of the cases where an officer was charged, the person killed was unarmed. But it usually took more than that.
When prosecutors pressed charges, The Post analysis found, there were typically other factors that made the case exceptional, including: a victim shot in the back, a video recording of the incident, incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a coverup.
Forty-three cases involved at least one of these four factors. Nineteen cases involved at least two. […]
In a third of the cases where officers faced charges, prosecutors introduced videos into evidence, saying they showed the slain suspects had posed no threat at the moment they were killed. […]
In nearly a quarter of the cases, an officer’s colleagues turned on him, giving statements or testifying that the officer opened fire even though the suspect posed no danger at the time.
In other words, there has to be some pretty damning evidence for prosecutors to bother pressing charges at all.
It gets worse, though. Of the 54 officers charged only 11 were convicted. That’s a prosecution rate about of one conviction for every five officers charged. So, even in these exceedingly rare instances where cops were charged with murder, cases that included the most damning evidence and circumstances, convictions or guilty pleas were obtained only about twenty percent (20%) of the time. And some of these cases where the cops got off are pretty damning, indeed.
[A] Michigan state trooper … shot and killed an unarmed homeless man in Detroit as he was shuffling toward him, the man’s pants down past his knees. The incident was captured on video, and the officer, who said he thought the man had a gun, was charged with second-degree murder. A jury accepted the officer’s account and found him not guilty. He remains on the job.
They also include a police officer in Darlington County, S.C., who was charged with murder after he chased an unarmed man wanted for stealing a gas grill and three U-Haul trailers into the woods, shooting him in the back four times. A jury, believing that he feared for his life, found him not guilty.
In that Michigan case, the homeless man had a blood alcohol level of .24%, three times the legal limit to convict a person for drunk driving. He was unarmed, pants around his knees, and the officer shot him anyway because he failed to obey the cop’s orders to stop moving. The trooper – who was not responding to a 911 call – came on the scene and got out of his vehicle when he first saw the deceased, 48 year old Eric Williams, in the immediate aftermath of Williams having been tossed out of a bar. The officer was not alone – his partner was with him. The incident was caught by a digital camera on a Detroit Police cruiser who did arrive in response to a 911 call. Nonetheless, the jury found for the trooper.
In the Darlington case, the evidence consisted of the body of the dead man, shot 4 times, and the testimony of the Deputy Sheriff who chased him and was the only “eyewitness” to the shooting. LEO testified the dead man tried to snatch his gun from him (sound familiar):
Robertson testified Sheffield put his hands on the officer’s holster. “I will shoot you,” Robertson said he told Sheffield. “He looked me in the eyes and he said, ‘Shoot me.”‘ Robertson testified. Sheffield wouldn’t take his hand of his gun, so Robertson said he fired two shots before Sheffield started to run away. Robertson said he chased him and the two nearly collided with Sheffield again grabbing at the gun. “I took my hands off his shoulder, I pulled the gun out of his grasp, and pushed him back, and as I did that, I fired and continued to fire several rounds,” Robertson said.
Live cop’s testimony beat out dead man’s body with four bullet wounds, at least in the mind of the jury that acquitted the officers.
But that’s just two cases. Back to the numbers:
Among the officers charged since 2005 for fatal shootings, more than three-quarters were white. Two-thirds of their victims were minorities, all but two of them black.
Nearly all other cases involved black officers who killed black victims. In one other instance, a Latino officer fatally shot a white person and in another an Asian officer killed a black person. There were a total of 49 victims.
To be specific, 43 white cops were indicted, as were 9 black cops (who only shot black victims – no black officer shot a white person) and two others, one Asian officer (who killed a black male) and one Latino (who killed a white male).
Here’s the breakdown of the victims:
Blacks: 33
Whites: 14
Other: 2
When you eliminate the black officers who killed blacks in these cases, and the one Asian officer who also shot a black person, you are left with 23 black people killed by killed by white officers, 13 white victims killed by white cops, and two other minorities killed by white cops. Of those cases, 21 officers were not convicted, and two more were not sentenced to any time. Nineteen cases are pending.
Of the 11 convicted officers, the maximum sentence anyone received was up to 10 years. Two received sentences of less than a year.
Go to this link to examine further details of each of the cases. You will find there cases in which juries acquitted officers despite both video evidence of the shooting and other police officers testifying against the defendant.
If these people had been anyone else but law enforcement officials, they would have been convicted. But then you might as well say the same thing about the many cases where police fatally shoot people and are never charged. Tamir Rice. John Crawford. Michael Brown. To name just three off the top of my head. Why? Because prosecutors will not prosecute cops 999 times out of a 1000.
Most of the time, prosecutors don’t press charges against police — even if there are strong suspicions that an officer has committed a crime. Prosecutors interviewed for this report say it takes compelling proof that at the time of the shooting the victim posed no threat either to the officer or to bystanders.
Jay Hodge, a former South Carolina prosecutor, said the question boils down to this: Can the evidence disprove the officer’s story that he was defending himself or protecting the public. Hodge recounted one case he had prosecuted in which a sheriff’s deputy said he had opened fire on an unarmed suspect who grabbed for his gun. The autopsy report, Hodge said, told a different story.
“You don’t shoot someone in the back four times and then claim self-defense,” he said. “They can’t be going for a gun if they are running away.”
In half the criminal cases identified by The Post and researchers at Bowling Green, prosecutors cited forensics and autopsy reports that showed this very thing: unarmed suspects who had been shot in the back.
And yet, even in cases where the evidence is clear cut, police still go free. I’m ashamed, disgusted and appalled. I can’t say I am surprised anymore, though.