Twenty-five years ago this week, a jury acquitted four Los Angeles police officers of the use of excessive force in the videotaped arrest and beating of Rodney King, setting off several days of widespread riots in Los Angeles.
Are things better now? No. Things are not better.
The jury failed to convict the white police officer who killed Walter Scott in South Carolina by shooting him in the back several times as he ran after being stopped for an equipment violation. Instead this week he got a plea deal by which he will spend some time in prison, but not nearly as much as he would have gotten on the murder conviction.
Also, this week we learned that the two white police officers who shot and killed Alton Sterling in Louisiana as he lay on the ground would not be indicted by the U.S. Department of Justice.
There is no real evidence that the use of force by police against African Americans has decreased since the Rodney King incident. If anything, data suggest that more African Americans are killed by police now than 25 years ago. Perhaps just as important is the fact that these officers are seldom prosecuted and convicted.
Police killed at least 4,024 people between January 2013 and June 2016; however, only 85 of these cases led to an officer being charged with a crime, and only six of these resulted in convictions. A committee of Black Lives Matter investigated police union contracts and statewide Law Enforcement Officer’s Bill of Rights laws and found them problematic for police accountability. These contractual arrangements bend over backward to shield the actions of police officers. Analysts point to these legal agreements as the culprits in causing Sterling’s killers not to be indicted.
Three years before the Rodney King riots, the U.S. Supreme Court made a ruling in Graham v Connor that set us on the current path of interpreting the police use of force. It in effect changed the view of the police use of force from that of a person encountering a state action that could potentially violate that person’s constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment to that of the police officer’s right, the right to use force if the officer has reasonable fear of personal harm. Thus, setting a high bar for prosecution of officers.
The “pattern or practice” lawsuit – authorized by Congress after the Rodney King riots, became an especially important Justice Department tool for reform, especially under Attorney General Eric Holder, as 25 police departments were formally investigated. Many of these cases are resolved by a consent decree which specifies various actions the police department must take to change their illegal practices. Please note, however, the new Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, is in the process of discarding this vital systemic approach.
Amidst all the current criminal justice nightmares for African Americans, I see one small hopeful sign. In a Pew Research Center survey completed in May of 2016, 50% of whites agreed that police treat blacks less fairly than whites in the country. Back in 1995 only 37% of whites thought so. I consider this a promising sign because it suggests a change—for the better–in the prevailing consensus about race and the police. We are unlikely to get positive changes in the way police treat African Americans if the majority of whites think there is no policing problem to be solved. So our current task is to convince more white Americans to see the obvious fact—blacks tend to get the short end of the stick from police departments.