Shootings by police increased in 2020
Number rose despite protests, more scrutiny
Jan. 29 would have been Ryan Whitaker’s 41st birthday. Like Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s Eve, it was the first his family celebrated without him.
The family recently settled a civil suit against the city of Phoenix for his death at the hands of police for $3 million. But the family says that does little to dull their pain and won’t curb their demands for accountability.
“Hard is not even the word for it,” said Steven Whitaker, Ryan’s brother. “There’s not a day that my mom doesn’t cry about it, for sure.”
Maricopa County Attorney Allister Adel announced on Jan. 29 that Jeff Cooke, the Phoenix police officer who shot and killed Whitaker, would not face criminal charges in his death.
Cooke shot Whitaker late the night of May 21, 2020, after he answered their knocks on the door of his Ahwatukee Foothills apartment with a gun. Three seconds passed between Whitaker emerging from the doorway and the officer putting two bullets in his back.
Cooke, who was responding to a noise complaint from a neighbor, said that he feared for his life. His partner at the scene, Officer John Ferragamo, said he would have done the same. But Whitaker’s family said officers shot
him for no reason. And criminal justice advocates said his death was just another example of police recklessly shooting to kill.
Whitaker was killed four days before an Arizona Department of Public Safety trooper fatally shot Dion Johnson on the side of Loop 101, the same day that George Floyd died under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer.
Their deaths were among several high-profile police shootings in 2020 that invigorated a protest movement against police violence in Arizona and across the country.
Despite a year of increased scrutiny on law enforcement and calls for reforming and defunding police, the number of Arizona police shootings in 2020 grew significantly from the year prior.
The Arizona Republic’s yearly analysis identified 74 police shootings across the state throughout 2020, including 26 by Phoenix police. These numbers represent increases from 2019, which saw 56 statewide and 15 in Phoenix.
The number of shootings is roughly the same as the statewide average for the 10-year period measured by The Republic. The number still trails 2018, when Arizona police shot people in 118 different incidents, the most the state had seen in a single year since at least 2011. That year, Phoenix police shot 47 people and had the highest rate of any municipal police department in the country.
The Republic also found that in Phoenix, people of color were shot at higher rates than white people and officers most often used deadly force while in majority Black and Hispanic communities in 2020.
Shootings were proportionately less deadly across the board in 2020, with 40 deaths in the state. However, analysis shows both shootings and deaths picked up in the second half of the year — a trend persisting into the beginning of 2021.
Law enforcement leaders maintain that shooting trends are entirely unpredictable, determined by the behavior of the community rather than the actions of the officers.
Community advocates argue these shootings are an urgent issue that only can be remedied by shifts away from violent policing toward policies that hold officers accountable.
“These shootings are going to keep happening because we haven’t met the needs of the community with the resources that would actually solve problems. We’ve met them with police officers and guns. That’s why we don’t see the police as a solution for safety in our neighborhoods.”
Ben Laughlin Policy director for Poder in Action
Analysis: Phoenix police shootings increased in 2020 but were less deadly
Arizona police shot 76 people in 74 separate incidents in 2020, The Republic found. This brought the state’s total from 2011 through 2020 to 731 shootings. 2020’s total was the fourth-highest since 2011 and a 32% increase from 2019’s shootings. The average annual total statewide is about 73 shootings, according to The Republic’s analysis.
Most people who were shot were armed, according to the police agencies. However, the definition of “armed” is often up for interpretation and determined by the officer at the scene. Firearms were the majority of the weapons reported, but weapons also included knives, cars, a BB gun, a saw and a metal bar.
Forty people were shot and killed by police across the state in 2020, up from 36 in 2019. In total, police fatally shot 428 people from 2011 through 2020.
Phoenix police accounted for 26 of 2020’s police shootings. By comparison, Phoenix police shot 15 people in 2019 after the department’s highly publicized 44 shootings in 2018. Last year’s 26 shootings are the third-highest total for the department in a decade.
In comparison, cities with similar size populations between 1.3 and 1.7 million had fewer shootings. Dallas had only five police shootings in 2020. San Diego had four. Philadelphia had eight. San Antonio had 19, according to data from each police department.
While 2020 saw a slightly above-average number of total police shootings in Phoenix, it was one of the less deadly years for the city over the past decade. The department had 11 fatal shootings in 2020, while 2018 had 22 deadly shootings and 2019 had 12. The city’s 10-year total of fatal shootings is 131.
“The number of incidents was up slightly from the average of 24 over the last decade,” Phoenix Police Department spokesperson Sgt. Mercedes Fortune wrote in an email to The Republic. “Of note ... is during the same 5-year evaluation, 2020 experienced the fewest number of fatal officer-involving shooting incidents.”
Asked whether the department had an explanation for the increase in police shootings and other trends in 2020, Fortune said no.
Both fatal and nonfatal police shooting rates in Phoenix grew in the second half of the year, with about three-quarters of the department’s shootings and killings occurring in and after June.
“Yeah, it was less deadly in the earlier part of the year. But that’s not the trajectory they’re on right now,” said Ben Laughlin, policy director for Poder in Action, a local criminal justice advocacy group that independently tracks police shootings in Phoenix.
It’s not clear whether the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, or the end of Arizona’s stay-at-home orders in May shortly before protests began, affected police shootings throughout the year.
“It’s really hard to gauge those first couple of months of the year because of COVID. None of us have ever existed in those kinds of conditions,” Laughlin said. “But what we did see is that there was actually an increase in officer-involved shootings as the protests and such ramped up.”
According to The Republic’s analysis, Phoenix police shot someone, on average, every 27 days from January through April 2020. The rate increased to once every 16 days from May through August. From September through the end of 2020, there was a Phoenix police shooting every eight days on average. This is the same rate as 2018.
Joe Clure, executive director of the Arizona Police Association, which advocates for officers’ interests, said “these shootings are predicated 99% of the time on the actions and the conduct of the other individual involved in the contact.”
“I think the responsibility lies largely and almost exclusively with the actions of the suspect,” Clure said. “We have no way of knowing nor controlling how people are going to respond in an oftentimes violent, deadly manner toward police officers that prompts a deadly force response.”
Phoenix police officers had more than 825,000 contacts with the public in 2020, the minority of which resulted in violence, said department spokesperson Fortune. She added the department recently launched the Center for Continuous Improvement to review “best practices in policing, including recommendations from the National Police Foundation and the US Conference of Mayor’s Committee on Police Reform.”
In an opinion column Phoenix police Chief Jeri Williams published on AZFamily, she said that these recommendations include “creating a use of force data dashboard, evaluating tactics to ensure we are impartial in our policing, and building up our community policing programs.”
Williams also detailed changes the department implemented in 2020, including “focusing on compassionate restraint training,” requiring officers to intervene in instances of excessive force by a fellow officer, and expecting officers to provide first aid until paramedics arrive.
Phoenix police shoot more often in areas that are majority people of color
Phoenix police shot Black and Native American people at a higher rate than their percentage of the population, the department’s data shows. In 2020, 25.9% of the people shot by the department were Black, 7.4% were Native American, 33.3% were Hispanic and 25.9% were white. The ethnicities and races were unknown for the remaining 7.4%.
The proportions of people who were Black or Native were more than triple each group’s share of Phoenix’s population. Phoenix is 42.6% Hispanic, 42.5% white, 7.1% Black and 2.1% Native, according to U.S. Census estimates from 2019.
The Republic found many Phoenix police shootings were concentrated in lower- to middle-class Census-defined neighborhoods where Hispanic people were the majority, consistent with findings of previous analysis.
In 2020, in one neighborhood near Interstate 17 north of downtown — the 0.35 square miles bordered by the freeway, Indian School Road, Campbell Avenue and 19th Avenue — police shot three people in five months, killing two. All three were Black.
Before 2020, police shot three people in this neighborhood from 2013 to 2018. With six people shot, it now has the highest number of police shootings in any Phoenix neighborhood in the past decade.
According to U.S. census data, of the 6,200 residents of the neighborhood, 91% are people of color, mostly Hispanic people, and 47% of people live below the poverty line, more than double the rate of Maricopa County’s 13.8%.
Phoenix police maps show this area was the worst hot spot for crimes against both people and property in 2020.
In June, police fatally shot Donald Ward, a 27-year-old Black man, who police said held a gun to the head of a woman he was dating.
On Nov, 13, police shot and injured 35-year-old Brian Streeter, a Black man police said assaulted a woman and pointed a gun to his own head.
A week later, police shot and killed Ekom Udofia, another Black man and an ex-NFL player who had a history of mental health struggles. He had approached police cruisers with a BB gun as officers yelled, “Don’t make me shoot you!”
No officer has been charged in connection with any 2020 police shooting
During the height of the protests in June, the Phoenix City Council approved full funding for a civilian oversight office that would review police shootings and claims of excessive use of force. Phoenix is one of few large cities in the country that does not have such an office.
However, the process was delayed indefinitely when an ordinance to establish the office failed in November. Councilmember Carlos Garcia, who has led the efforts for the Office of Accountability and Transparency, said he hopes to bring the ordinance back in April.
“I really would hope that my colleagues and the public would understand how important this issue is and that we need to do something about it. I don’t know how else to get their attention when we’ve already seen literal partners, daughters, husbands, wives of victims of police violence come forward and tell their stories,” Garcia said.
Currently, when a Phoenix police officer shoots someone, the Phoenix Police Department conducts an investigation. Afterward, the department submits its report to the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office for prosecutors to determine whether criminal charges should be filed against the officer.
No officer has been charged in connection with any 2020 police shooting. The last officer in the state to have been charged for involvement in an on-duty shooting was ex-Mesa Officer Nathan Chisler in 2019, whose charges were dismissed by a Maricopa County Superior Court judge in December 2020. Before Chisler, only two officers had been charged in connection with a police shooting since 2010; one of those, exPhoenix Officer Richard Chrisman, was convicted.
Community advocates said the review process is what shields officers from liability for their actions and is part of the reason shootings continue to happen without intervention.
“When you delay real accountability, the people who need to be held accountable are just going to keep perpetuating the violence that we see in our communities,” said Black Lives Matter Phoenix Metro policy minister and public defender Jamaar Williams. Policymakers “have all given police this hall pass to shoot us and kill us in the streets.”
The real solution to police shootings are resources and nonviolent responses to the underlying problems communities are facing, advocates agreed.
“These shootings are going to keep happening because we haven’t met the needs of the community with the resources that would actually solve problems. We’ve met them with police officers and guns,” said Laughlin with Poder in Action.
“That’s why we don’t see the police as a solution for safety in our neighborhoods. And that’s why we push for these other types of resources that do contribute to the safety of neighborhoods, the strength of neighborhoods.”
Local protest organizer Jacob Raiford said he and other activists are directing their organizing energy toward community-based programs.
“A lot of us are working with methods to create community or neighborhood response programs for mental health, for the unsheltered community, for drug-related issues and dispatchers in order to take that responsibility away from the police and place that back on the community,” Raiford said.
17-year-old boy among those killed in police shootings in 2021
There have been 13 law enforcement shootings across the state in 2021 as of Saturday.
Four shootings were by Phoenix police. The remaining were by the Chandler police, Avondale police, Glendale police, Payson police, Tucson police, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, the Yavapai County Sheriff ’s Office and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department. All but four were deadly.
In Chandler, officers shot 17-year-old Anthony Cano twice in the back after they alleged he displayed a gun at a police officer the night of Jan. 2. Cano died from his injuries after three weeks in critical condition at the hospital.
Body-worn camera footage from the incident posted on Facebook by the Chandler Police Department shows the officer following Cano in his patrol vehicle after noting that he was riding his bike without a headlight into lanes of traffic. The boy then ditched his bike and fled, and the officer followed on foot. The officer was not identified.
After a brief chase into Gazelle Meadows Park, the video shows Cano drop a handgun and stop to retrieve it.
“Weapon drawn! Get on the ground!” the officer yelled.
He then shot Cano in the back. Seconds later, the officer fired a second shot into the boy’s back while he laid on the ground.
Lorenzo Soria grew up with Cano in the neighborhood where he was shot. He told The Republic that Cano was likely on his way over to his house for a bonfire.
“I take care of Anthony, he’s always with me and stuff, he’s like a little brother to me,” Soria said.
The family’s GoFundMe for Cano has raised more than $7,000.
Poder in Action reposted the GoFundMe on social media and said, “Police initially contacted Anthony because his bicycle had no headlight. Time and time again we see police target our neighborhoods and escalate interactions. We shouldn’t have unnecessary contact between police and our community that lead to our death.”