In
2014, Only 224 of 18,000 U.S law enforcement agencies reported a fatal
shooting by their officers. The overwhelming majority of police
departments are not required, nor seem to even care about reporting on
the number of people they kill.
“It is unacceptable that
The Washington Post and the Guardian newspaper from the U.K. are
becoming the lead source of information about violent encounters between
police and civilians. That is not good for anybody,” FBI Director James
Comey lamented, last year, noting that the media is doing a better job than they are.
There is no real system in
place to count the number of people killed by police, beyond the good
work of independent media and advocacy groups. The FBI relies on a
voluntary system where local police departments report data on deadly
use of force — if they so choose.
Naturally, most departments refuse to submit data.
Thanks to the vigilance of concerned media and advocacy groups, however, cops are finding it quite hard to hide their violence.
In January 2016, police
killed 113 people — at least one person was fatally gunned down by a cop
every day that month. One particularly deadly day, January 27, saw ten
people meet their fate, thanks to the police. On average, that is almost
4 people a day.
And there is no indication this tragic epidemic will end soon.
We know that American cops
killed 113 people in January, not because the police told us about them,
but because there are hard working people out there who care about this
vital information.
Sites like Fatal Encounters, or Cop Crisis, with its beautifully coded graphical interface, count police killings as a public service. Killed By Police also
ran one of the most comprehensive databases on police killings as they
listed 1,205 total killings by law enforcement for 2015, but hasn’t yet
listed any statistics for 2016.
Last year, police killings
reached such a level of media coverage, that even the Guardian got in on
the tally with their project The Counted.
Until recently, Americans relied solely on the state to report their own killings — a truly futile cause.
Nearly a thousand times this year, an American police officer has shot and killed a civilian.
When the people hired to protect their
communities end up killing someone, they can be called heroes or
criminals — a judgment that has never come more quickly or searingly
than in this era of viral video, body cameras and dash cams. A single
bullet fired at the adrenaline-charged apex of a chase can end a life,
wreck a career, spark a riot, spike racial tensions and alter the
politics of the nation.
In a year-long study, The Washington Post found that the kind of
incidents that have ignited protests in many U.S. communities — most
often, white police officers killing unarmed black men — represent less
than 4 percent of fatal police shootings. Meanwhile, The Post found that
the great majority of people who died at the hands of the police fit at
least one of three categories: they were wielding weapons, they were
suicidal or mentally troubled, or they ran when officers told them to
halt.
The Post sought to compile a record of every fatal police shooting in
the nation in 2015, something no government agency had done. The
project began after a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown in
Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, provoking several nights of fiery riots,
weeks of protests and a national reckoning with the nexus of race, crime
and police use of force.
Race remains the most volatile flash point in any accounting of
police shootings. Although black men make up only 6 percent of the U.S.
population, they account for 40 percent of the unarmed men shot to death
by police this year, The Post’s database shows. In the majority of
cases in which police shot and killed a person who had attacked someone
with a weapon or brandished a gun, the person who was shot was white.
But a hugely disproportionate number — 3 in 5 — of those killed after
exhibiting less threatening behavior were black or Hispanic.
Regardless of race, in more than a quarter of cases, the fatal
encounter involved officers pursuing someone on foot or by car — making
chases one of the most common scenarios in the data. Some police chiefs
and training experts say more restrictive rules on when to give chase
could prevent unnecessary shootings.
Like a growing number of police shootings, the death of David Kassick
on a snow-covered field near his sister’s house in Hummelstown, Pa.,
was captured on video — a technological shift that has dramatically
altered how Americans perceive officers’ use of deadly force.
In two minutes and 10 seconds of harrowing footage, the Kassick video
serves as an almost perfect Rorschach test in the national debate over
when it is justifiable for an officer to take a life.
Lots more @ WaPo here
Douglas County, GA — Bobby Daniels was a
peace officer by trade – a private security guard employed at CNN’s
headquarters in Atlanta. When he learned that his emotionally troubled
25-year-old son Bias had suffered a breakdown and was holding a fellow
security guard at gunpoint in a mobile home part in Douglasville, Bobby raced to the scene.
Using the skills of persuasion and patient de-escalation upon which a
private peace officer must rely, Bobby persuaded his son to relinquish
his handgun and place it on the hood of a car.
Just seconds later, Daniels was fatally shot – not by his mentally ill son, but by the sheriff’s deputies who had arrived on the scene.
In
familiar fashion, law enforcement officials insist that the victim of
this police shooting – at least the 960th to occur in 2015 – was to
blame, and they have provided contradictory accounts as to how it happened.
“I
think that he could have been trying to help the situation instead of
hurting it, but when he pointed the gun at the officers, he was shot,”
asserted Douglas County Sheriff Phil Miller in remarks to reports at the
scene shortly after the December 21 incident.
A different
official account provided by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation claims
that as Bobby and Bias struggled over control of the gun, deputies
attempted to incapacitate the younger man with a taser.
“As the
fight continued between Bias and Bobby, the handgun was pointed at the
deputies, at which point one of the deputy [sic] fired, striking and
killing Bobby,” according to the GBI.
“There’s no doubt in my mind
that my officer thought his life was in danger, and he did what he
thought he had to do,” insists Sheriff Miller, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
CLEVELAND
(Reuters) - Community leaders asked a judge on Tuesday to issue arrest
warrants for two Cleveland policemen in the 2014 fatal shooting of a
12-year-old boy carrying a replica handgun even as prosecutors mull
charges against the officers.
* it was NOT a "replica handgun"-it was an Airsoft handgun with the orange safety tip removed
The move, a signal of distrust
in the community toward the authorities handling the case, represents an
attempt to bypass the local prosecutor's office by using an obscure
Ohio state law that allows citizens to request an arrest.
The
two officers involved in the shooting are white and the boy, Tamir
Rice, was black. This is one of a number of cases bringing fresh
scrutiny to the issue of police use of force in the United States,
particularly against minorities.
"Today, citizens are taking
matters into their own hands utilizing the tools of democracy as an
instrument of justice," Olivet Institutional Baptist Church pastor
Jawanza Colvin said in a statement.
Cleveland's
police department agreed last month on a plan to minimize racial bias
and the use of excessive force after the U.S. Justice Department found a
pattern of abuses against civilians by the local police.
A mourner reads the obituary from the program during the funeral service for Tamir Rice in Cleveland …
Rice was shot outside a city recreation center last Nov. 22
while he played with a Airsoft-type replica handgun used in play combat.
Rookie
police officer Timothy Loehmann fired at Rice twice within two seconds
of arriving at the scene with his partner Frank Garmback in response to a
911 emergency call about a man with a gun outside the recreation
center, according to authorities. The sixth-grader died the next day.
Cuyahoga
County Prosecutor Timothy McGinty has said the evidence in the shooting
will be presented to a grand jury to decide on whether to bring charges
against Loehmann and Garmback after a county sheriff's department
completed its investigation last week.
Rice family lawyer Walter
Madison said his clients were worried about the transfer of the case to
the prosecutor in light of the acquittal of Cleveland police officer
Michael Brelo in May in another case.
Brelo, who is white, was charged with two counts of voluntary manslaughter in the deaths of a black man and a woman.
Those
who will present citizens' affidavits to a judge asserting "probable
cause" in Rice's death include a Case Western Reserve University
professor and local clergy.
It
was not clear whether the tactic will work. Joe Frolik, the local
prosecutor's spokesman, said Ohio's constitution requires all felony
charges be brought by a grand jury.
In an alley in Denver, police gunned down a 17-year-old girl
joyriding in a stolen car. In the backwoods of North Carolina, police
opened fire on a gun-wielding moonshiner. And in a high-rise apartment
in Birmingham, Ala., police shot an elderly man after his son asked them
to make sure he was okay. Douglas Harris, 77, answered the door with a
gun.
The three are among at least 385 people shot and killed by
police nationwide during the first five months of this year, more than
two a day, according to a Washington Post analysis. That is more than
twice the rate of fatal police shootings tallied by the federal
government over the past decade, a count that officials concede is
incomplete.
“These shootings are grossly underreported,” said
Jim Bueermann, a former police chief and president of the
Washington-based Police Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated
to improving law enforcement. “We are never going to reduce the number
of police shootings if we don’t begin to accurately track this
information.”
A national debate is raging
about police use of deadly force, especially against minorities. To
understand why and how often these shootings occur, The Washington Post
is compiling a database of every fatal shooting by police in 2015, as
well as of every officer killed by gunfire in the line of duty. The Post
looked exclusively at shootings, not killings by other means, such as
stun guns and deaths in police custody.
Using interviews, police
reports, local news accounts and other sources, The Post tracked more
than a dozen details about each killing through Friday, including the
victim’s race, whether the person was armed and the circumstances that
led to the fatal encounter. The result is an unprecedented examination
of these shootings, many of which began as minor incidents and suddenly
escalated into violence.
Among The Post’s findings:
●About
half the victims were white, half minority. But the demographics
shifted sharply among the unarmed victims, two-thirds of whom were black
or Hispanic. Overall, blacks were killed at three times the rate of
whites or other minorities when adjusting by the population of the
census tracts where the shootings occurred.
●The
vast majority of victims — more than 80 percent — were armed with
potentially lethal objects, primarily guns, but also knives, machetes,
revving vehicles and, in one case, a nail gun.
●Forty-nine people
had no weapon, while the guns wielded by 13 others turned out to be
toys. In all, 16 percent were either carrying a toy or were unarmed.
●The
dead ranged in age from 16 to 83. Eight were children younger than 18,
including Jessie Hernandez, 17, who was shot three times by Denver
police officers as she and a carload of friends allegedly tried to run
them down.
The Post analysis also sheds light on the situations
that most commonly gave rise to fatal shootings. About half of the time,
police were responding to people seeking help with domestic
disturbances and other complex social situations: A homeless person
behaving erratically. A boyfriend threatening violence. A son trying to
kill himself.
Ninety-two victims — nearly a quarter of those killed — were identified by police or family members as mentally ill.
In
Miami Gardens, Fla., Catherine Daniels called 911 when she couldn’t
persuade her son, Lavall Hall, a 25-year-old black man, to come in out
of the cold early one morning in February. A diagnosed schizophrenic who
stood 5-foot-4 and weighed barely 120 pounds, Hall was wearing boxer
shorts and an undershirt and waving a broomstick when police arrived.
They tried to stun him with a Taser gun and then shot him.
The other half of shootings involved non-domestic crimes, such as
robberies, or the routine duties that occupy patrol officers, such as
serving warrants.
Nicholas T. Thomas, a 23-year-old black man,
was killed in March when police in Smyrna, Ga., tried to serve him with a
warrant for failing to pay $170 in felony probation fees. Thomas fled
the Goodyear tire shop where he worked as a mechanic, and police shot
into his car.
Although race was a dividing
line, those who died by police gunfire often had much in common. Most
were poor and had a history of run-ins with law enforcement over mostly
small-time crimes, sometimes because they were emotionally troubled.
Both
things were true of Daniel Elrod, a 39-year-old white man. Elrod had
been arrested at least 16 times over the past 15 years; he was taken
into protective custody twice last year because Omaha police feared he
might hurt himself.
On the day he died in February, Elrod robbed a
Family Dollar store. Police said he ran when officers arrived, jumping
on top of a BMW in the parking lot and yelling, “Shoot me, shoot me.”
Elrod, who was unarmed, was shot three times as he made a “mid-air leap”
to clear a barbed-wire fence, according to police records.
Baltimore, MD — This week, protests and
riots erupted in Baltimore, in response to the police murder of an
innocent 27-year-old man named Freddie Gray.
According to police, Gray was first stopped and arrested by officers
at 8:39am on April 12 and was thrown in the back of a police van 15
minutes later. An entire hour later an ambulance was called to give him
medical care, but he sadly fell into a coma died soon after. He suffered
broken vertebra and an injured voice box, which required emergency
spinal surgery that he never recovered from.
Many suspect that Gray was the victim of a “Nickel Ride”, a horrific
police torture tactic where a suspect is handcuffed and placed in the
back of a police van without restraints, and driven recklessly around
town by police officers. This practice has also been called a “Rough
Ride” or a “Cowboy Ride.”
“We know he was not buckled in the transportation wagon, as he should have been. No excuses for that, period,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said Friday. “We know our police employees failed to get him medical attention in a timely manner multiple times.”
According to NBC News,
Davis said the police van stopped
three times before arriving at the station. It stopped first so police
could place “leg irons” on Gray, and stopped a second time “to deal with
Mr. Gray, and the facts of that interaction are under investigation,”
Davis said.
The van stopped a third time to pick
up a second prisoner and went on to the Western District police
station, where an ambulance was called, Davis said. “At no point was he
wearing a seat belt,” while in the police van, Davis said. Police policy
requires all prisoners to wear seat belts during transport.
Last year, Nickel Rides became notorious in Philadelphia,
after a court case revealed that police were using this tactic as a
witness-free way to punish unruly, uncooperative, or arrogant suspects –
without ever laying a hand on them. For rogue police, it was a literal
way to deliver “street justice.”
The practice was exposed through the lawsuit of a man named James
McKenna, who was awarded $490,000 after he was able to prove in court
that he was intentionally injured during his ride in a police van.
Baltimore itself also has a dark history of police van torture. In
fact, Baltimore Police have paid out millions of dollars in settlements
to victims who were critically injured during rides in police vans. In
2012, a woman from Baltimore named Christine Abbott sued police after she was badly injured during a bumpy ride in the back of a police van.
That same year, the death of Anthony Anderson was ruled a homicide, he too died of injuries sustained while riding in a police van.
Freddie Gray Arrest Record, Criminal History & Rap Sheet
Gray had a lengthy arrest record with convictions dating back until at least 2007, according to the Maryland Department of Justice.
Not all of the arrests led to convictions, in many of the cases he
pleaded guilty to one charge while the others were dropped. Details of
when he spent time in prison were not immediately available. His arrest
record includes at least 18 arrests:
March 20, 2015: Possession of a Controlled Dangerous Substance
March 13, 2015: Malicious destruction of property, second-degree assault
January 20, 2015: Fourth-degree burglary, trespassing
January 14, 2015: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance,
possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute
December 31, 2014: Possession of narcotics with intent to distribute
December 14, 2014: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance
August 31, 2014: Illegal gambling, trespassing
January 25, 2014: Possession of marijuana
September 28, 2013: Distribution of narcotics, unlawful possession
of a controlled dangerous substance, second-degree assault,
second-degree escape
April 13, 2012: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with
intent to distribute, unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous
substance, violation of probation
July 16, 2008: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance, possession with intent to distribute
March 28, 2008: Unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous substance
March 14, 2008: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to manufacture and distribute
February 11, 2008: Unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous substance, possession of a controlled dangerous substance
August 29, 2007: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with intent to distribute, violation of probation
August 28, 2007: Possession of marijuana
August 23, 2007: False statement to a peace officer, unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous substance
July 16, 2007: Possession of a controlled dangerous substance with
intent to distribute, unlawful possession of a controlled dangerous
substance (2 counts)
Cell Phone Video Captures Police Officer Killing a Man as He Tried to Hide in a Stack of Lumber
Lakewood, WA — Daniel Corarrubias, 37, was killed by Lakewood police as he tried to hide in the Pinnacle Lumber Plywood yard.
A 7-second cell phone video captures the final moments of
Corarrubias’ life as the Lakewood officer drew his weapon and fired 10
shots, hitting him in the head and torso.
Officers were responding to calls of a suspicious man walking through
the parking lot of the lumber yard. When they came upon the man
attempting to hide, they killed him.
According to police, Corarrubias tried to reach into his pocket,
which is why they fired ten rounds into him. However, police have
refused to divulge whether or not the man was armed at all.
“I know he didn’t have a weapon,” his sister said. “I want to ask
police why? Why? Why they just didn’t shoot him in the arm, shoot him in
the leg, maim him or something. Not murder my brother.”
According to KOMO News,
A man who says he watched security camera and cell phone
video of the shooting told KOMO News 10 shots can be heard during the
encounter. The source, who asked not to be identified, says the man
sustained gunshot wounds to the head and torso.
Stinson, 50, has become an indispensable source for researchers and
reporters looking into alleged crimes and acts of violence by police
officers because he has built a database tracking thousands of incidents
in which officers were arrested since 2005. His data has shown that
even the few police officers who are arrested for drunken driving are rarely convicted and that arrests spike
for cops who have been on the force 18 years or longer, contrary to
prior research showing it was mostly new officers who were acting out.
The whole data-collecting operation is powered by 48 Google Alerts
that Stinson set up in 2005, along with individual Google Alerts for
each of nearly 6,000 arrests of officers. He has set up 10 Gmail
addresses to collect all the alert emails, which feed articles into a
database that also contains court records and videos.
It all adds up to a data set of alleged police misconduct unmatched
by anything created inside or outside of government, which itself often
uses Google Alerts to catch these cases.1
Yet Stinson’s database inevitably has holes because it relies on the
media to cover every officer arrest, and because it takes immense effort
to code each entry. The data set keeps falling behind.
Stinson’s path to police-misconduct expertise was a winding one. A
high-school dropout, he worked for police departments in Arlington,
Virginia, and Dover, New Hampshire, before getting his law degree, then
turning in his license after mishandling client funds. He switched to
criminology, getting his Ph.D. in 2009. He chose his research subject in
part because of his experiences as a cop, seeing police officers get
away with crimes others wouldn’t, and in part because he wanted to win a
bet he’d made in his Master’s program. Now he’s the recipient of a
National Institute of Justice grant to study police misconduct, host of an occasional podcast on the topic, and a go-to source for the media.
Stinson says he has no bias against his former profession. “This
isn’t anti-police,” he said. “I hope to write papers and get things
published that are helpful to law enforcement, not that bash law
enforcement.”
The following is an edited transcript of my telephone interview with Stinson, with some followup questions by email. Carl Bialik: You’ve worked with the media on stories about
arrests for killings by police, and recently you’ve also been a source
on arrests of police for DUIs. You’ve also studied sex crimes and corruption. How did you become the expert on police arrests? Philip Stinson: The idea came up in the fall of 2004, when I
was finishing my master’s at West Chester University of Pennsylvania. I
was taking an ethics class. Somebody in the class — it was a bunch of
cops in class, mid-career — somebody made a comment that cops don’t get
in trouble much. I said, “That’s just absurd.” I started looking into it
and realized there are no government statistics, and no government
agency tracking it well.
I set up 48 Google Alerts, let it rip, and started printing pages out. Originally it was to win a bet in the master’s class. CB: What did you bet? PS: I don’t know. It was a beer or something. I wasn’t a betting man. It wasn’t anything big.
I had two and a half years, three years of data in my dissertation, covering 2005 to 2007, with 109 quantitative variables.
And then over time at Bowling Green, we now track 270 or so
quantitative variables. Everything is automated now. Because data
collection is real-time — you can’t use Lexis Nexis, NewsBank,
all these other archival news databases, because lots of stuff has
disappeared from the Internet — so because of that it’s very slow and
time-consuming. It takes forever to do.
Some reporters wanted everything I had — everything. I was like, go fuck yourself. You get everything. I just spent 10 years on this.
Now we’re up to almost 11,000 cases involving almost 9,000 officers.
We log these cases, then make Google Alerts on individual names so we
can track cases through courts and the media.2 CB: How sure are you that The Washington Post’s count of 54 police officers charged with fatal shootings while on duty is a complete count? PS: I want to make it very clear I’ve never claimed I have
every case. It’s possible that’s not an exhaustive list. If anything, I
think we’re missing just a handful of cases of killings, because those
kinds of cases get news coverage. I’d have to hazard a guess that we do a
better job of collecting data in smaller metropolitan areas and rural
areas, because arrests there are so newsworthy. CB: How much do you think you miss by relying on media reports? PS: If I had 1,100 arrest cases, I can’t believe there are
another 1,100 out there. I doubt we’re missing half, but there aren’t
none. CB: You were a lawyer before going to graduate school for criminology. What happened? PS: I fucked up in my law practice [Stinson Law Associates,
PC, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania]. I was charged with several crimes and
the commingling of funds in 2002. It was the kiss of death. I paid a
heavy price and took a heavy hit. CB: Did you do what you were charged with doing? PS: I did it. [“Chronic sleep deprivation exacerbated mental
health issues that I was not aware that I had and led to impaired
judgment in many instances, and for that I’m very remorseful and in
treatment,” Stinson told the Philadelphia Inquirer in 2002.] Everybody was made whole eventually.
I don’t like to leave that out [that I did this]. It’s not something
I’m proud of, and I don’t like seeing it in print. It really has nothing
to do with why I am doing this research.
I certainly think I’ve done everything I can to rehabilitate myself.
If I were teaching theology, it would never come up, but in
criminology, it does come up sometimes with students, so I usually walk
into the classroom and lay it out there.
A photo of Stinson from summer 1986 when he was a police officer in Dover, New Hampshire.
Courtesy of Philip M. Stinson
CB: What was your experience as a cop and did it influence your work? PS: When I went to New Hampshire, I saw some crazy shit. It
really changed my outlook on things. When people were arrested, they
would take them into the booking room, and sometimes the sergeant would
come in and just beat the shit out of the guy while he was handcuffed —
shit like that.
I was floored with my experience up there. In the two years I was up there, I saw all kinds of shit I did not know happened.
They faked reports, and there was creative report writing, to fit the
arrest they wanted to have. There was evidence that was tampered with
and overly suggestive court identifications to nail people with shit. It
was quite an eye-opener. [When asked for comment, Anthony Colarusso,
chief of Dover’s police department, said, “I feel strongly that the
Dover Police Department has a high level of integrity and has had that
since I joined the police department in May of 1985. In fact, our
longstanding policy is that officers be terminated for any level of
untruthfulness.” He added, “No police department is perfect, but we are
very aggressive in holding ourselves accountable for our actions.”]
So I sort of had that kind of stuff in the back of my head for many years.
San Antonio, TX–The family of Jesse
Aguirre, 37, who was killed by San Antonio police just over two years
ago have filed a lawsuit against the city and eight police officers
involved in his killing. Recently released dashcam footage captured the
final moments of the tragic event that left a boy without his father.
Named in the suit are officers Cristina Gonzales, Roberto Mendez,
Jennifer Morgan, Bettina Arredondo, Ronald Haley, Benito Juarez, Robert
Encina, and SAPD spokesperson Douglas Greene.
The lawsuit, filed on behalf of Aguirre’s son and widow states that
Aguirre’s civil rights were violated when the officers ended his life.
Aguirre had been in a car accident. He was intoxicated and high on
cocaine when he attempted to leave the scene of the crash in an “excited
delirium” after his girlfriend decided to break up with him. The police
allege that he was driving a stolen vehicle and arguing with his
girlfriend when he crashed into a fence.
The department alleges Aguirre resisted arrest when officers caught
up with him and cuffed him. They claim four officers were needed to
subdue him. The department told his wife that he died from cardiac
arrest, and it wasn’t until she received the autopsy report that she
found out that wasn’t exactly the case. The lawsuit alleges that the
police suffocated him to death.
“While Mr. Aguirre was on the ground he made numerous cries for help and pleaded he could not breath,” the lawsuit states.
“The officers were deliberately indifferent to the fact that Mr.
Aguirre was suffocating under the weight of the officers and in serious
physical danger of asphyxiation based upon the positional restraints and
body weight and force applied to him.”
In the video, Aguirre is seen walking, not running, away from
officers who have their weapons pointed at him. When he stops to speak
to the officers, he is handcuffed and then violently flipped head first
over a concrete road barrier.
“Come here, come here, I’m going to shoot you motherf*cker!” a female officer yells as she approaches him.
Eventually, he is slammed face down on the ground as the officers pile on top of him.
“After several minutes without any action taken by the
officers to relieve Mr. Aguirre of physical distress and danger, Mr.
Aguirre stopped communicating and moving,” the complaint stated. “After
several more minutes of Mr. Aguirre lying motionless face down on the
highway with the officers’ body weight on top of him the officers
finally realized he was not breathing.”
Houston, TX — A high-speed pursuit
through the northeast side of Houston, Texas ended tragically Wednesday
morning. Police officers shot and killed the man who tried to flee. The
entire scene unfolded on Live TV.
The chase began after officers attempted to pull the vehicle over and the driver refused to stop.
According to Click2Houston,
The vehicle exited on Wallisville Road, then the driver
eventually crashed into multiple vehicles and stopped near the
intersection of Castlegory Road.
Several officers then jumped out with weapons drawn. The driver got
out of the vehicle and it appeared he reached back into the vehicle.
At least one officer opened fire and the driver then appeared to fall
to the ground. The Harris County Sheriff’s Office confirmed the suspect
is dead.
A new study released by the Washington
Post reveals that for every 1000 people killed at the hands of police,
only one officer is convicted of a crime. Since 2005, although there
have been thousands of fatal shootings by police officers, only 54 have
been charged. Of those charged, most were cleared or acquitted.
This analysis is, to date, the most comprehensive of its kind. According to the Post:
“The 54 criminal prosecutions were identified by Bowling
Green State University criminologist Philip M. Stinson and The
Washington Post. Cases were culled from news reports, grand jury
announcements and news releases from prosecutors. For individual cases,
reporters obtained and reviewed thousands of pages of court records,
police reports, grand jury indictments, witness testimony and video
recordings. Dozens of prosecutors and defense attorneys in the cases
were interviewed, along with legal experts, officers who were prosecuted
and surviving relatives of the shooting victims.”
It stands to reason that if there are thousands of fatalities due to
police shootings, the number of police charged would be much higher than
it is. According to the analysis, in order for prosecutors to press
charges, there had to be exceptional factors at play. These include “a
video recording of the incident, a victim shot in the back,
incriminating testimony from other officers or allegations of a
coverup.”
According to Bowling Green criminologist Philip M. Stinson, “To
charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious,
so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way. It
also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their
reputation on.”
On the rare occasion an officer is charged with a crime, the
punishment on average is much lower than would be expected, some
spending only weeks behind bars. The prosecutors and defense lawyers
interviewed in the study attribute this to the fact that “Jurors are very reluctant to punish police officers, tending to view them as guardians of order.”
The most alarming part about this study is that the number of people
fatally shot by police could potentially be much higher because police departments are not required to keep the database of police shootings updated. This is terrifying, as it’s arguably one of the most important records a police department could keep. http://thefreethoughtproject.com/study-reveals-police-officers-murder-alarming-rate/?utm_source=The+Free+Thought+Project+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=dbc016103b-RSS_FEED_NEWSLETTER12_18_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_ae40e945ed-dbc016103b-211636157
ZION, Ill. (AP) — An autopsy has
revealed that a teenager killed by a police officer in Illinois over
the weekend was shot twice in the back, authorities said Monday.
Justus Howell
was shot by Zion police on Saturday afternoon. Police say officers
responding to a call about an altercation began chasing a male when he
ran from the scene. They say that after the teen was shot, officers
recovered a handgun.
The Lake
County Coroner's Office said in a statement Monday that one bullet
struck the 17-year-old in the left back and penetrated his heart, spleen
and liver. Another bullet struck him on the right side of his back.
Tests to determine whether drugs were in the victim's system are
pending.
The Zion police
chief didn't return calls Monday seeking comment about the autopsy
results. Zion is a community of about 24,000 people along Lake Michigan
about 45 miles north of Chicago, near Illinois' border with Wisconsin.
Howell
was black and his relatives contacted the NAACP asking its officials to
speak on their behalf, according to Lake County NAACP president
Jennifer Witherspoon. She says Howell's relatives are hoping to find out
exactly what happened as quickly as possible.
"Whether it was a
mistake on his part or a mistake on the police's part, they want answers
to make sure something like this never happens again," she said.
A Lake County Major Crimes Task Force Investigator holds an evidence bag on Saturday, April 2, 2015 …
The teen's death comes months after an unarmed black
18-year-old was shot and killed by a white police officer in Ferguson,
Missouri, an incident that sparked protests and heightened concerns
about how minorities are treated by police around country. Police in
Zion haven't provided any details on the officer involved in Howell's
shooting, including the officer's race.
"Here in America we are
seeing this with too many brown and black boys," said Witherspoon, who
added she was encouraged that Zion police quickly handed the
investigation over to the Lake County Major Crime Task Force.
Family members gathered Sunday near the site of the shooting to pay tribute to Howell.
Howell,
was a high school junior who transferred from a school in Wisconsin to
Waukegan Public School District 60, spokesman Nick Alajakis told the
Chicago Tribune.
Alajakis
said the teenager attended the Lakeshore Academy, a privately-operated
school that takes students from the district and, according to the
district's website, serves academically struggling students.
KENOSHA, Wis. (AP) — On his
first day back from a mandatory leave for shooting and wounding a
knife-wielding man earlier this month, a Wisconsin police officer shot
and killed an armed suspect after confronting him following a chase,
authorities said.
Kenosha
police officer Pablo Torres returned from leave Saturday, 10 days after
shooting a man who advanced on police armed with knives, the department
said. While that March 4 shooting was investigated, Torres was placed on
administrative leave by department policy in police-involved shootings.
He also attended annual in-service training before returning to work
last weekend, police said.
On Saturday morning, police chased a
car driven by 26-year-old Aaron Siler, who was wanted on a felony
probation and parole warrant, Lt. Brad Hetlet said in a statement. Siler
crashed at around 9:30 a.m. and took off running.
When Torres confronted Siler, Siler "armed himself with a weapon" and Torres fatally shot him, Hetlet said.
Wisconsin
online court records show a man with the same name and birthdate as
Siler was charged in 2011 in Kenosha County with strangulation, false
imprisonment, battery and disorderly conduct. He pleaded no contest to
strangulation with the other charges dismissed and was sentenced in 2013
to four years of probation on condition he serve one year in jail.
In
2011, the same man pleaded guilty to bail jumping and was sentenced in
May 2013 to credit served for 563 days he spent in jail. A theft charge
was dismissed.
In the earlier
officer-involved shooting, Torres was among three officers and a
recruit who went to a home after a woman called to say her husband had
gone into the garage to kill himself. Police say the man was armed with
two knives and was seated in a running vehicle. When the man refused to
drop the knives, two officers shot him with Tasers. When the man began
advancing on police, Torres shot him once in the stomach. The man is
expected to survive.
Hetlet said police had no additional information to release about the shooting of Siler.
Kenosha is in southeastern Wisconsin between Milwaukee and Chicago.
A
deputy shot and killed an unarmed man while attempting to serve a
narcotics search warrant in Deltona, according to the Volusia County
Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators said deputies were entering the
home on Maybrook Drive when Derek Cruice, 26, allegedly advanced on a
member of the SWAT team around 6:30 a.m. Wednesday.
“Volusia
County Sheriff’s Office narcotics investigators and the Street Crimes
Unit were attempting to serve a search warrant at a residence. They were
met with resistance and a shooting occurred,” Volusia County Sheriff
Ben Johnson said.
A deputy shot Cruice in the face right in the doorway, investigators said.
Cruice was taken to Florida Hospital Fish Memorial Hospital in Orange City as a trauma alert, but later died.
There were five other people inside the home at the time of the shooting, but no one else was injured.
If
he was shot in the doorway, it seems unlikely he had much time to
process what was going on around him. In fact, not only was Cruice
unarmed, according to his roommates, he was wearing only basketball
shorts. The roommates also dispute the police account that Cruice “advanced” on them.
Two
of Cruice’s friends, who told WESH 2′s Claire Metz that they were
inside the house when he was shot, insist that he did not threaten or
resist the deputy.
“That is completely a lie. I was there; I
watched the whole thing. There was no advancement. There was no reaching
for anything. The guy was wearing basketball shorts like I am. It’s
kind of hard to conceal anything or hide anything when this is all you
have on,” said Cruice’s friend, who asked not to be identified.
Another friend called the incident “murder.” There were no weapons in the house.
It
seems likely that Cruice was dealing pot. The police say they found a
ledger book, a scale, about a half-pound of marijuana and some cash. It
also seems likely that if the police had simply knocked on the door and
waited, or apprehended Cruice as he was coming or going, Cruice would be
still be alive. This insistence on serving drug warrants by barreling
into homes creates needless violence, confusion and confrontation.
They’re designed to do this. I doubt that Cruice knowingly
decided to take on a raiding police team armed only with his basketball
shorts. It seems far more likely that he thought they were criminal
intruders and was either trying to confront them, or was trying to
escape. But there is no room for errors in judgment for the people on
the receiving end of these raids — even though sowing confusion and
disorientation are the stated aim. But it is only the suspects,
the targets of the raids, who are expected to do everything right. When
the police screw up and kill someone, they’re generally forgiven, owing
again to the volatility of the situation.
So judging from the
many, many prior incidents similar to this one, it’s probably safe to
say that this officer will be cleared of any wrongdoing. It’s also
probably safe to say that any investigation will determine that there’s
nothing wrong with the police department’s warrant service policies. At
least that’s how these investigations usually go. And if it is
determined that the cops in these cases are following policy, and that
there’s nothing wrong with the policies themselves, then the only
conclusion we can draw is that the police agencies believe unarmed men
getting shot in the face is an acceptable consequence of the effort
to stop people from getting high on marijuana.
Of course, even that is an illusion. If there’s one thing we can say
with near-absolute certainty, it’s that it is no more difficult to buy
pot in Volusia County, Fla., today than it was before Derek Cruice was
gunned down in his own home. And so we add another body to the pile.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice is preparing to
sue the Ferguson, Missouri, police department over allegations of
racially discriminatory practices unless the police force agrees to make
changes, CNN reported on Wednesday.
The network,
citing sources, said the Justice Department would not charge the white
Ferguson police officer involved in the fatal shooting of unarmed black
teenager Michael Brown last August but was expected to outline
allegations of discriminatory Ferguson police tactics.
The department would file suit if Ferguson police did not agree to review and change those tactics, CNN reported.
The shooting of Brown last August by officer Darren Wilson
led to months of sometimes violent protests in Ferguson and galvanized
critics of the treatment by police and the U.S. criminal justice system
of blacks and other minority groups.
A St. Louis County grand jury decided last year not to
prosecute Wilson, who has since left the Ferguson police force. The
Justice Department has been conducting probes of the shooting and the
operations of the Ferguson police force.
Justice Department spokesman Peter Carr declined to comment on the CNN report.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who is preparing to
leave office, said earlier this month he hoped to complete the civil
rights investigation of the shooting before he steps down.
CNN said the potential Justice Department lawsuit could
include allegations that police targeted minorities in issuing minor
traffic infractions and then jailed them if they could not pay the
fines.
It
reported the agency would seek court supervision of changes taken by
Ferguson police to improve its dealings with minorities.
(Reporting by Peter Cooney; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
The
police officer who fired the shot that killed an unarmed man in a
Brooklyn housing project in November has been indicted, according to
three people familiar with the grand jury proceedings.
Peter Liang, 27, who had been on the force for less than 18 months,
was patrolling a darkened stairwell at the Louis H. Pink Houses in East
New York when he shot and killed Akai Gurley, 28. Less than 12 hours
after the shooting, Police Commissioner William J. Bratton acknowledged
that the shooting had been a grave error.
A
formal announcement by the district attorney’s office was expected on
Wednesday afternoon, but whether the indictment against Officer Liang
includes any homicide counts, such as manslaughter, could not be
immediately determined.
When
Officer Liang and his partner entered an eighth-floor stairwell in the
building, he had his gun drawn, according to the police. At nearly the
same moment, Mr. Gurley and his girlfriend entered the seventh-floor
stairwell, 14 steps below.
The
charges, reported by NY1 on Tuesday afternoon, come two months after a
grand jury on Staten Island declined to bring criminal charges against
Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the death of Eric Garner, who died after an
encounter with the police.
It
came at a time of heightened tension between the police and minority
communities and was one of several cases that advocates for police
reform cited as evidence of overly aggressive police tactics.
Police have stepped up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses after a
report of a threat that they are being targeted by a notorious
Baltimore gang, police sources said.
Police have stepped up security at two Brooklyn stationhouses
after a report they are being targeted by a notorious Baltimore gang,
police sources and the Sergeants Benevolent Association said Tuesday
night.
A police source said that Emergency Service Unit cops were sent
to the 79th and 81st precinct stationhouses in Bedford-Stuyvesant and
Brownsville after an informant reported the threat, but it had not yet
been validated.
An NYPD spokesman would not confirm the threat or if security was heightened at either station.
But a Daily News reporter witnessed two ESU trucks parked in front
of the 79th precinct and four SWAT members standing in the building’s
lobby with rifles in hand.
Important info re
credible attack from a CI: Black Guerilla Family to storm the 079/081
Pct Station Houses & shoot it out with MOS.
— SBA (@SBANYPD) December 24, 2014
At the 81st precinct, two SWAT members guarded the lobby along with
three officers, with a couple more SWAT officers around the corner.
"My wife, she’s actually at home crying right now. It’s tough," said one of the SWAT members.
Here's an idea for police everywhere-stop acting like stormtroopers,stop treating citizens as the enemy,stop seizing peoples legally owned property in the failed war on drugs,stop seizing legally earned cash and property from citizens during traffic stops,stop having drug sniffing dogs falsely "alert"on cars so you can search them,stop violently taking citizens to the ground,tazing and pepper spraying them for not "obeying" your "commands",remember-shiny badges do NOT grant special rights!
There are no frills to be found
at www.killedbypolice.net. The
site is just a simple spreadsheet. The information it contains,
though, is invaluable. It is a list of every single person
documented to have been killed by police in the United States in
2013 and 2014. There are links to a media report for every single
death, as well as their names, ages, and when known, sex and
race.
The site is so valuable because, as we’ve
noted previously, there is no reliable national database for
keeping track of the number of people killed by police each year.
The FBI tracks homicides by law enforcement officers, but
participation is voluntary, and many agencies don’t participate. As
I noted last week, Eric Garner’s death at the hands of a New York
Police Department
won’t show up in the FBI’s statistics for 2014 because the
state of New York does not participate in the program.
The FBI’s statistics for 2013 say that law enforcement officers
killed 461 people that year. Killedbypolice.net apparently got its
start last year. Using their system of monitoring by news report,
they have calculated that police actually killed 748 people between May
and December. That’s 287 more than the FBI reports for the
whole year.
And for 2014, which still has a couple of weeks left, the site
has reported 1,029 people have been killed by police. That’s about
a 30 percent increase over last year, though with four-month gap at
the start of 2013 (measuring 25 percent of the year), it's possible
the numbers would be much closer if we had January through April.
Even with the FBI’s broken numbers, we know that 2013 marked a
two-decade high in killings by police.
Neither the site nor its Facebook page
indicates who is responsible for compiling this information, and
they’re protecting their identity by hosting the site through
GoDaddy. We can’t talk to whoever is responsible for this database
about how or why they started it and how much effort it is to keep
track of this information. Here is a page for people to submit information
to help improve the quality of the database.
U.S.
Attorney General Eric Holder (L) and Acting Assistant Attorney General
Vanita Gupta (R) listen as U.S. Attorney Steve Dettlebach speaks at a
press conference on December 4, 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio. (Photo by
Angelo Merendino/Getty Images)
The Department of Justice has released a report of its investigation into the Cleveland Police Department. My Post colleague Emily Badger beat me to the punch on this, but the findings are staggering.
Our
investigation concluded that there is reasonable cause to believe that
CDP engages in a pattern or practice of using unreasonable force in
violation of the Fourth Amendment. That pattern manifested in a range of ways, including:
The unnecessary and excessive use of deadly force, including shootings and head strikes with impact weapons;
The unnecessary, excessive or retaliatory use of less lethal force including tasers, chemical spray and fists;
Excessive
force against persons who are mentally ill or in crisis, including in
cases where the officers were called exclusively for a welfare check;
and
The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place
officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and
places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk.
In other words, the department fails in just about every possible measurable way. And it goes on like that:
.
. . we found incidents of CDP officers firing their guns at people who
do not pose an immediate threat of death or serious bodily injury to
officers or others and using guns in a careless and dangerous manner,
including hitting people on the head with their guns, in circumstances
where deadly force is not justified. Officers also use less lethal force
that is significantly out of proportion to the resistance encountered
and officers too often escalate incidents with citizens instead of using
effective and accepted tactics to de-escalate tension. We reviewed
incidents where officers used Tasers,3 oleoresin capsicum spray
(“OC Spray”), or punched people who were already subdued, including
people in handcuffs. Many of these people could have been controlled
with a lesser application of force. At times, this force appears to have
been applied as punishment for the person’s earlier verbal or physical
resistance to an officer’s command, and is not based on a current threat
posed by the person. This retaliatory use of force is not legally
justified. Our review also revealed that officers use excessive force
against individuals who are in mental health crisis or who may be unable
to understand or comply with officers’ commands, including when the
individual is not suspected of having committed any crime at all.
In
addition to the pattern or practice of excessive force, we found that
CDP officers commit tactical errors that endanger both themselves and
others in the Cleveland community and, in some instances, may result in
constitutional violations. They too often fire their weapons in a manner
and in circumstances that place innocent bystanders in danger; and
accidentally fire them, sometimes fortuitously hitting nothing and other
times shooting people and seriously injuring them. CDP officers too
often use dangerous and poor tactics to try to gain control of suspects,
which results in the application of additional force or places others
in danger. Critically, officers do not make effective use of
de-escalation techniques, too often instead escalating encounters and
employing force when it may not be needed and could be avoided. While
these tactical errors may not always result in constitutional
violations, they place officers, suspects, and other members of the
Cleveland community at risk.
The department also fails at holding cops accountable after the fact.
