Study: Two years after Ferguson, fatal shootings by police increase
As the use of deadly force by police once again roils the nation, the number of fatal shootings by officers has increased from 465 in the first six months of last year to 491 for the same period this year, according to an ongoing two-year study by The Washington Post. This year has also seen more officers shot and killed in the line of duty and more officers prosecuted for questionable shootings.
Two years after a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., the pace of fatal shootings has risen slightly while the grim encounters are increasingly being captured on video and stoking outrage.
On Tuesday, two white police officers in Baton Rouge shot and killed a black man whom they had pinned to the ground outside a convenience store. The event was captured in a video that went viral online., and within hours The U.S. Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation. On Wednesday, an officer in Falcon Heights, Minn., shot and killed a black man during a traffic stop. The aftermath of the shooting also was captured on a video that has received widespread attention.
"I feel change is not coming," said Porsche McCullough, whose 29-year-old black female cousin was shot and killed by an Asian San Francisco police officer in May. "The community is tired. They are tired of seeing black people shot, poor people shot, people with substance-abuse problems shot."
A Post database that tracks fatal shootings by police shows a 6 percent increase in the number of such deaths during the first six months of 2016 compared with the same period last year. Details of the fatal encounters so far this year remain strikingly similar to shootings in all of 2015: Blacks continued to be shot at 2.5 times the rate of whites. About half of those killed were white and about half were minorities. Fewer than 10 percent of all those killed were unarmed. One-quarter were mentally ill.
But there are notable differences: More of the shootings were captured on video, from 76 to 105 in the first half of each year. And the number of fatal shootings of black women, such as Nelson-Williams, has risen. Nearly the same number of black women have been killed so far this year as in all of 2015 — eight compared with 10.
Last year, The Washington Post began to log every fatal police shooting in the nation and then analyzed more than a dozen details about each event. The project revealed that in 2015, nearly 1,000 people were fatally shot by police, more than twice the average annual number reported by the FBI in previous years.
The Post has expanded the effort in 2016, culling media reports and filing hundreds of public-records requests to obtain the names and work histories of officers involved in fatal shootings — information that is not tracked by any federal agency. More than 360 officers' names have been added to the database, and more names will be included as The Post obtains additional information.
As was the case in 2015, in most fatal shootings this year officers were confronted by subjects armed with guns.In half of these cases, they fired at police, prompting officers to fire their own guns to defend themselves or to protect bystanders. In the first six months of this year, 20 officers were fatally shot in the line of duty, compared with 16 in the first six months of 2015, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page.
Officials representing rankand-file officers say it is criminals who make it hard to reduce the number of fatal shootings by police.
"Police are dealing with a lot of violent individuals," said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Nashville-based national Fraternal Order of Police. "And the criteria for using deadly force hasn't changed essentially, so why would the numbers change?"
After Ferguson, pleas for reforms focused on reducing certain types of shootings, such as those of individuals who are unarmed or experiencing mentalhealth crises as opposed to violent criminals who initiate shootouts with officers.
What followed was a White House task force that called for teaching officers new skills to de- escalate volatile encounters. Hundreds of police chiefs also pushed new policies for dealing with the mentally ill. And thousands of departments began outfitting officers with body-worn cameras, hoping this would curb the use of excessive force.
The FBI also vowed to improve its data collection on the fatal use of force by police. The agency said that in January 2017, it would start to compile a more accurate tally and would collect dozens of details about the incidents in order to analyze the events.
But widespread compliance with the FBI's initiative by police associations and departments isn't expected until 2019. The agency is seeking unanimous consent from numerous police groups regarding what data should be collected, a process that is still underway. And thousands of departments will need to build the software that will allow them to properly track and report the data. Even then, reporting will not be mandatory.
Training reforms, which the White House and police chiefs have embraced, also are rolling out in a slow, scattershot fashion. There are about 18,000 police departments in the nation, many with their own training academies and unions, making it impossible for them to move in lock step.
There will be a "lag time" before there is a measurable drop in deaths, even among the departments that are earnestly embracing reforms, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston.
"It takes time to get everyone through training," Fox said. "It takes time to change a culture."
The nation's focus in 2016 shifted away from fatal shootings by police and toward a historic and often bizarre presidential campaign — in which policing policy has received little widespread attention. Dozens of shootings, however, continued to generate outrage in local communities.
In San Francisco, Porsche McCullough's cousin, Jessica Nelson-Williams, died on a foggy May morning as she tried to flee from San Francisco police down a dead-end street driving a stolen Honda Accord. Sgt. Justin Erb fired a single shot into the car, striking Williams, killing her.
It was the third fatal shooting by police over the past seven months in the city. All of the dead were homeless; all of them minorities. Within hours, a makeshift memorial sprouted on the spot where Nelson-Williams died — the familiar jumble of flowers and candles that has marked the scenes of police shootings in cities across the nation.
The local protests have rarely led to the nationwide demonstrations that turned past police shooting victims such as Brown, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, and Walter Scott in North Charleston, S.C., into household names.
"Are we becoming anesthetized to these violent events? Are they happening so often we no longer feel moved?" said Cedric Alexander, a police chief in DeKalb County, Ga., and member of the White House Task Force on 21st Century Policing.
This week's fatal shootings by police of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota have brought back the national outrage. How long it lasts remain to be seen.
IN 2016, FATAL SHOOTINGS by police are increasingly captured by cameras, a Post analysis shows. In the first six months, at least 105 shootings have been recorded in whole or in part by police-worn body cameras, surveillance cameras, cameras mounted on patrol cars or bystanders' smartphone cameras.
At this point last year, that number was 76.
The biggest shift has been in the use of body-worn cameras: 63 of the shootings have been captured through June, compared with 34 for the same period in 2015.
The videos have been a linchpin for prosecutors, activists and city mayors who want to hold police chiefs and officers accountable for questionable shootings.
Graphic video of fatal shootings has led to the firing of sever- al police leaders, including Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy in December. On May 19, Police Chief Greg Suhr stepped down at the urging of the city's mayor, Ed Lee, hours after Nelson-Williams was killed in San Francisco. Although Nelson-Williams's killing was not captured on video, San Francisco police were recorded in the preceding months fatally shooting two homeless men.
In the past 18 months, murder and manslaughter charges brought against officers in fatal shootings have tripled, while the presence of video evidence in these cases has doubled, a Post analysis shows.
From 2005 to 2014, 47 officers were criminally charged in fatal shootings, with 15 of those cases involving video evidence.
In 2015, 18 officers were criminally charged, with 10 of the cases involving video. And, so far this year, seven officers have been criminally charged, with five involving video evidence.
"With video, it no longer comes down to the word of police against people who are dead or against people who could be easily discredited," said Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green State University in Ohio who studies arrests of police.
IN MESA, ARI Z ., PROSECUTORS said they charged an officer after video contradicted his account of what led him to shoot and kill an unarmed man at a hotel.
On Jan. 18, Officer Philip Mitchell Brailsford of the Mesa police responded to a 911 call from a La Quinta Inn where guests spotted someone pointing a rifle out of a fifth-floor window. Police traced the incident to a room where 26-year-old Daniel Shaver was drinking rum shots with a woman. When officers arrived, they ordered the two of them into the hallway.
Brailsford later told investigators that Shaver became uncooperative, made a "furtive movement" toward the waistband of his shorts, and that he feared Shaver was attempting to retrieve a gun. Brailsford shot Shaver five times. Brailsford is white and so was Shaver.
But Shaver was unarmed when shot, and the woman told a story that was different from the officer's. She said that seconds before being shot, Shaver was crawling toward officers, crying and saying, "Please don't shoot me."
Prosecutors said video from Shaver's body camera supported the woman's version of events. "Shaver was audibly sobbing as he crawled" toward officers, a police report said, adding that Shaver said, "No, please don't shoot me."
Brailsford was carrying an AR15 rifle, with the phrase "You're F-ked" etched into the weapon. The police report also said the "shots were fired so rapidly that in watching the video at regular speed, one cannot count them."
The video also showed Shaver's shorts were falling off as he crawled, and, according to the police report, he may have reached toward his waistband to pull them up. Brailsford shot just as Shaver's empty hand moved back in front of him toward the ground, the report said.