Only 54 cops charged out of thousands of fatal shootings; 'egregious' factors triggered prosecutions
Though law enforcement officers fatally shot thousands of suspects in the past decade, only 54 officers were charged, an analysis has found.
Thirty-five of those cases have been resolved, and in 21 of the cases the officers were acquitted or the charges were dropped, according to the Washington Post, which conducted the analysis with Bowling Green State University. The study sought to identify every officer who has been charged in a fatal shooting based on public records and interviews with police, judges and police.
The victim was unarmed in the “overwhelming majority” of cases in which an officer was charged, the story says. Also common in many of the cases: The victim was shot in the back, a video recorded the incident, other officers testified against the officer, or the charged officer was accused of a cover-up.
Bowling Green criminologist Philip Stinson summarized the findings this way: “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,” he said.
Other findings in the 54 cases:
–The average sentence was four years for officers who were convicted or who pleaded guilty.
–In half the cases, unarmed suspects had been shot in the back.
–Prosecutors relied on videos in a third of the cases where officers were charged.
–An officer’s colleagues testified against him in nearly a quarter of the cases.
–In about a fifth of the cases, officers were accused of planting of destroying evidence in an attempt to justify the shooting.
Police had wide latitude to shoot fleeing felons until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Tennessee v. Garner in 1985. The Fourth Amendment decision struck down a law authorizing the shooting of fleeing felony suspects. The court said deadly force can’t be used unless the suspect poses a risk of death or serious injury to the officer or others.
Inartfully worded headline and first paragraph rewritten at 11:25 a.m.
