Adante Pointer, a civil rights lawyer, said it was not hard for officers to prevail when the case boiled down to what was going through the minds of the officer and victim in the moment: “The only person left to tell the story is the cop.”
That means a killing could be considered justified if the officer claimed he feared the person was armed or saw them gesturing toward their waistband – even if it turned out the victim was unarmed and the threat was nonexistent.Īs a result, very few police officers get charged. But the court later said that an officer’s state of mind and fear in the moment was relevant to determining whether the shooting was warranted. In 1985, the US supreme court ruled that officers can use lethal force against a fleeing person only if they reasonably believed that person was an imminent threat. The law has for years allowed police to kill civilians in a wide variety of circumstances. Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images People in Newark, New Jersey, march demanding justice for Jayland Walker in July 2022. The numbers haven’t changed since the start of the Black Lives Matter movement, and they haven’t budged since George Floyd’s murder inspired international protests in 2020. US police kill more people in days than many countries do in years, with roughly 1,100 fatalities a year since 2013. “In 20, at the beginning of this national conversation about racism in policing, the idea was, ‘There are bad apples in police departments, and if we just charged or fired those particularly bad officers, we could save lives and stop police violence,’” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence, but “this data shows that this is much bigger than any individual officer.” ‘Hunted down’
The data, advocates and experts say, highlights how the US legal system allows officers to kill with impunity and how reform efforts have not addressed fundamental flaws in police departments. Police kill hundreds of people who are fleeing every year in the US, but are rarely charged or convicted
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