In Dallas last week a white police officer, Roy Oliver, was found guilty of murder for the April 2017 shooting death of a 15-year-old African American boy. This was a rare conviction for police officers killing innocent black men and youth.
Police fatally shoot an average of around 1000 people each year, and the criminal justice system holds that almost every single shooting is legal and justifiable. According to The Guardian, unarmed blacks were killed at five times the rate of unarmed whites in 2015. Police killed at least 102 unarmed black people in that year, and in only 10 of the 102 cases were officers charged with a crime, and in only two of the deaths were officers convicted.
With so few convictions as common practice, what is it about this case that resulted in a conviction?
“For an officer to be convicted of murder resulting from an on-duty shooting, the facts of the incident have to be so bizarre that there is no rational explanation for the officer’s actions,” said Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University who tracks police misconduct. “I think that shooting into a car full of teenagers as they slowly drive down the street away from the officer fits that pattern.”
That aspect of the situation may be a reason; however, there have been many flagrant shootings of unarmed blacks that did not result in convictions. Therefore other issues must be involved.
One issue might be that the police department fired Oliver after the shooting because that was his second shooting of an unarmed person among other problematic issues.
Another factor—and maybe the primary issue–is that Oliver’s police partner disagreed with Oliver and said he did not fear for his safety from the car full of youth. This latter point removed the legal excuse that has prevailed in these cases–the officer claiming that he or she felt threatened.
One reason for the lack of prosecution and subsequent conviction begins with the Supreme Court’s legal standard for the use of lethal force. According to Graham v. Connor, the landmark 1989 case that established the rule, each “use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” The ruling specifically cautions against judging police too harshly for split-second decisions made in “tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving” situations. All of this gives officers plenty of leeway to explain why their actions were legal.
The Graham decision in 1989 in effect changed the view of the police use of force from that of an person encountering a state action that could potentially be a violation of the person’s constitutional rights under the Fourth Amendment to that of the police officer’s right, the right to act if they have a reasonable fear. In other words, this shifts the focus from the citizens’ constitutional rights to the rights of workers in a profession—police officers. The current question is whether that policy is consistent with individual rights under the Constitution.
The emphasis now is on police officers’ fear for their safety. As a Philadelphia Police Department spokesperson said: “Officers’ safety comes first, and not infringing on people’s rights comes second.”
In some cases, a police officer has avoided prosecution for an extrajudicial killing because he feared that the person was reaching for an imaginary gun. This assumption is a privilege not usually granted in a civilian-to-civilian encounter. It is extremely unlikely that citizen A would be excused for shooting and killing citizen B if he offered the excuse that he feared that citizen B was reaching for a gun—when there was no gun. It would seem that by providing a police officer that privilege he or she is given more rights than a civilian, meaning that their life is more important than a civilian’s life. The very opposite should be the case. Police officers, like soldiers, are presumed to be ready to lay their life on the line for citizens. That is a principal reason we revere them.
If the intended situation is to place the police officer’s life equal to that of the civilian, we need to make these rules clear and have police practices conform. On the other hand, if the intent is to value the police officer’s life as more important than a citizen’s life, we need to debate this issue in public and the courts. A large proportion of the citizenry might object to that orientation as a practice.