After police shootings, officers are rarely prosecuted, but many are fired
A police officer shoots and kills a black man who probably never posed a threat. If prosecutors file charges, the cop goes on trial but is set free because a jury fails to reach a verdict or decides that the officer had reasonable – though mistaken – fear and was acting in self-defense.
That leaves the police department to decide whether to continue to employ the officer.
As more high-profile shooting investigations come to a close, a pattern has emerged: Departments are firing the officers or forcing their resignations. Even so, some officers win appeals or get policing jobs elsewhere.
The most recent example is the firing of Blane Salamoni, the white officer who shot Alton Sterling – who was 37 and black – six times outside a convenience store in Baton Rouge, La., on July 5, 2016.
Salamoni was responding to a 911 call about a man making threats. Sterling was known for hawking CDS outside the store.
The killing ignited protests and debates across the country over race and policing. Bystander videos showed cops scuffling with Sterling but not whether Sterling had a gun or made a threat. At one point, an officer screams, “Gun! He’s got a gun!” before shots are heard from Salamoni’s gun.
The U.S. Department of Justice agreed that Sterling had a gun and declined to prosecute the 30-year-old officer. Then late last month, the state of Louisiana said that it too had decided not to press charges against the officer.
But days later, the Baton Rouge Police Department fired Salamoni for violating department command-of-temper and use-of-force policies. The A pedestrian walks past a mural and a memorial wall for Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, La., in July 2016. The Department of Justice did not bring federal civil rights charges against two police officers involved in Sterling’s death.
officer has filed an appeal against the firing to the Municipal Fire and Police Civil Service board.
While the legal bar to prosecute officers for shootings remains high, experts say public pressure and protests have left police chiefs with little room but to get rid of officers who could be seen as liabilities. Some of those officers win appeals, while others get jobs policing elsewhere. Many never return to law enforcement.
“It boils down to how the public sees the issue,” said Justin Bamberg, a South Carolinabased attorney who has represented the families of Sterling and several other men who have died in high-profile police shootings.
“How vocal is the public and whose side are they for?” Bambeg said. “Even if we know an officer is cleared criminally, which is the majority of the time, it’s hard for an officer to keep serving in a community.”
Police chiefs also have to consider other issues, said Delores Jones-brown, a professor emeritus at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Insurance carriers have been dropping police departments
because they have cops on the roster who are involved in shootings and are now liabilities,” she said. “If they can find a justifiable way to remove an officer, police chiefs will.”
Here’s a sampling of what’s happened to officers who have killed and were never convicted:
Betty Shelby in Tulsa, Okla.
Protests erupted in September 2016 after video was released of Officer Betty Shelby pulling over Tulsa resident Terence Crutcher and shooting him after he got out of his car. Shelby, who is white, said Crutcher, who was black, was not obeying her commands and that she felt he was a threat to her life. Crutcher was unarmed.
Shelby was placed on leave until last May, when a jury acquitted her of manslaughter. Shortly thereafter, the Tulsa police chief said Shelby would return to the force but would be assigned to a desk job.
Civil rights groups demanded Shelby be fired or resign. In July, Shelby relented and quit.
“Since being reinstated, I have found that sitting behind a desk, isolated from all my fellow
officers and the citizens of Tulsa, is just not for me,” she said in a statement from her union, Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 93.
The next month, she was hired by the Sheriff’s Office in neighboring Rogers County.
Jeronimo Yanez in Falcon Heights, Minn.
In July 2016, Jeronimo Yanez fatally shot 32-year-old Philando Castile in what began as traffic stop in the St. Paul, Minn., suburb of Falcon Heights.
Castile’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, was in the car with her daughter and broadcast the shooting live on Facebook. Yanez, who is Latino, shot and killed Castile, who was black. He says he thought Castile was reaching for a gun. Reynolds said that as her boyfriend was reaching for his identification he told the officer he had a gun and was licensed to carry it.
Last July, a jury found 28-year-old Yanez not guilty in the shooting death. The city of St. Anthony, which had employed him as an officer and contracted his services to Falcon Heights, offered him a $48,000 buyout.
A body-cam video that shows a New Jersey state trooper conducting a roadside strip search has raised questions about how far law enforcement officers are permitted to go during a traffic stop.
Trooper Joseph Drew pulled a car over for tailgating and said he smelled marijuana. When a search of the car turned up nothing, he handcuffed the driver and told him to step out of the vehicle.
“You can tell me where it is right now or I can go in and get it,” Drew says on the video.
The trooper is then seen pulling on blue latex gloves, reaching into the driver’s underwear, and groping his genitals and buttocks while the two stand on Route 206 in Southampton, Burlington County. All the while, trucks and cars pass by on the busy highway.
The driver, a 23-year-old Toms River, N.J., man, insisted several times he had no marijuana and doubted such a search was legal.
No drugs were found in the man’s car or on his body, and in the end he was issued a ticket for tailgating. The driver has filed notice of intention to sue, alleging that he was sexually assaulted and that his civil rights were violated.
In the video, the driver can be heard protesting that he is being sexually assaulted as the trooper repeatedly touches his genitals during a four-minute search of the man’s underwear.
Earlier, the trooper checked the man’s pockets and socks and ordered him to turn over drugs, the video shows. Then he told him, “If you think this is the worst I’m going to do, you have another thing coming, my friend.”
Maria Haberfeld, a professor of policing and police ethics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said the search was unwarranted.