Updated by German Lopez @germanrlopez
german.lopez@vox.com Sep 21, 2016, 1:45p
Terence Crutcher, a black
40-year-old man, was unarmed. He appeared to be cooperating with police, with
his hands up as they escorted him toward his car. Yet suddenly, in moments that
were largely obstructed in the videos released by the Tulsa Police Department
on Monday, an officer shot and killed Crutcher.
According to the local newspaper
Tulsa World, police were responding to an unrelated call on Friday, September
16, when they spotted Crutcher’s stalled car. We don’t know what happened when
police arrived at the scene. Instead, the videos begin as Crutcher is guided by
officers, one of whom is aiming her gun at him, slowly to his car. He has his
hands up during this time.
Police say that Crutcher then
failed to follow orders — leading officer Betty Shelby to fire her weapon and
officer Tyler Turnbough to use his Taser on Crutcher. By the looks of the
videos, the Taser and gun were seemingly fired almost simultaneously.
RelatedWhy police so often see
unarmed black men as threats
The videos — one a police
dashboard camera on the ground, another on a helicopter in the air — are
obstructed by officers and Crutcher’s car at the exact moment he was shot. That
makes it hard to discern whether Crutcher had his hands up right as Shelby
pulled the trigger.
But Crutcher had his hands up in
the air until at least the seconds before he was shot, and he appears —
although, again, it’s hard to say for sure — to put his hands on the roof of
his car right before the officer fired.
Police found no gun on Crutcher
or in his car.
Law enforcement reportedly found
PCP in Crutcher's car. An attorney for Shelby told Tulsa World that she thought
Crutcher was on drugs when she shot him. But that has no bearing on whether the
shooting was legally justified — unless Crutcher acted in a dangerous or
threatening manner before he was shot, which the video doesn't show.
A local investigation into the
shooting is currently underway. The US Department of Justice also opened an
independent investigation into the shooting.
The shooting has already inspired
strong condemnations from the Black Lives Matter movement, with activist and
New York Daily News columnist Shaun Kingcalling for the police officers
involved to be arrested. The shooting exemplifies yet another example of the
racial disparities in police use of force — showing that even when a black man
holds his hands up, he can still be at risk of getting shot and killed by the
police.
An analysis of the available FBI
data by Vox’s Dara Lind shows that US police kill black people at
disproportionate rates: They accounted for 31 percent of police killing victims
in 2012, even though they made up just 13 percent of the US population.
Although the data is incomplete, since it’s based on voluntary reports from
police agencies around the country, it highlights the vast disparities in how
police use force.
Black teens were 21 times as
likely as white teens to be shot and killed by police between 2010 and 2012,
according to a ProPublica analysis of the FBI data. ProPublica’s Ryan
Gabrielson, Ryann Grochowski Jones, and Eric Sagara reported: "One way of
appreciating that stark disparity, ProPublica’s analysis shows, is to calculate
how many more whites over those three years would have had to have been killed
for them to have been at equal risk. The number is jarring — 185, more than one
per week."
There have been several
high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore,
six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police
custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with
murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who
was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed
18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo
killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.
BLACK TEENS WERE 21 TIMES AS
LIKELY AS WHITE TEENS TO BE SHOT AND KILLED BY POLICE BETWEEN 2010 AND 2012
One possible explanation for the
racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are
disproportionately black. That means they're going to be generally more likely
to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests,
against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing
actions carry a chance, however small, to escalate into a violent
confrontation.
That's not to say that higher
crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police
shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, "There is no
relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime
rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed
in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to
local-level crime rates." That suggests something else — such as,
potentially, racial bias — is going on.
One reason to believe racial bias
is a factor: Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in
video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder
psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias
could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. "In the very
situation in which [officers] most need their training," he said, "we
have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail
them."
Part of the solution to potential
bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their
potential subconscious prejudices. But critics also argue that more
accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force,
since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse
of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to
legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might
be excessive.
Police only have to reasonably
perceive a threat to justify shooting
Legally, what most matters in
police shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their
lives were in immediate danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed
a threat. So in the Crutcher case, the question is whether the officers
involved thought he reasonably posed an immediate threat to them or others —
and what exactly Crutcher did to warrant that.
In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme
Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garnerand Graham v. Connor — set up a framework
for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.
Constitutionally, "police
officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances," David Klinger, a
University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, told Vox’s
Lind. The first circumstance is "to protect their life or the life of
another innocent party" — what departments call the
"defense-of-life" standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a
suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the
suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.
The logic behind the second
circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called
Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a
15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a
house.) The court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to
escape. But, as Klinger said, "they basically say that the job of a cop is
to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing,
you can shoot them to stop their flight."
THE KEY TO BOTH OF THE LEGAL
STANDARDS IS THAT IT DOESN’T MATTER WHETHER THERE IS AN ACTUAL THREAT WHEN
FORCE IS USED
The key to both of the legal
standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn’t
matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what
matters is the officer’s "objectively reasonable" belief that there
is a threat.
That standard comes from the
other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v. Connor.
This was a civil lawsuit brought by a man who’d survived his encounter with
police officers, but who’d been treated roughly, had his face shoved into the
hood of a car, and broken his foot — all while he was suffering a diabetic attack.
The court didn’t rule on whether
the officers’ treatment of him had been justified, but it did say that the
officers couldn’t justify their conduct just based on whether their intentions
were good. They had to demonstrate that their actions were "objectively
reasonable," given the circumstances and compared to what other police
officers might do.
What’s "objectively
reasonable" changes as the circumstances change. "One can’t just say,
'Because I could use deadly force 10 seconds ago, that means I can use deadly
force again now," Walter Katz, a California attorney who specializes in
oversight of law enforcement agencies, said.
In general, officers are given
lot of legal latitude to use force without fear of punishment. The intention
behind these legal standards is to give police officers leeway to make
split-second decisions to protect themselves and bystanders. And although
critics argue that these legal standards give law enforcement a license to kill
innocent or unarmed people, police officers say they are essential to their
safety.
For some critics, the question
isn’t what’s legally justified but rather what’s preventable. "We have to
get beyond what is legal and start focusing on what is preventable. Most are
preventable," Ronald Davis, a former police chief who heads the Justice
Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, told the
Washington Post. Police "need to stop chasing down suspects, hopping
fences, and landing on top of someone with a gun," he added. "When they
do that, they have no choice but to shoot."
Police rarely get prosecuted for
shootings
Police are very rarely prosecuted
for shootings — and not just because the law allows them wide latitude to use
force on the job. Sometimes the investigations fall onto the same police
department the officer is from, which creates major conflicts of interest.
Other times the only available evidence comes from eyewitnesses, who may not be
as trustworthy in the public eye as a police officer.
"There is a tendency to
believe an officer over a civilian, in terms of credibility," David
Rudovsky, a civil rights lawyer who co-wrote Prosecuting Misconduct: Law and
Litigation, told Amanda Taub for Vox. "And when an officer is on trial,
reasonable doubt has a lot of bite. A prosecutor needs a very strong case
before a jury will say that somebody who we generally trust to protect us has
so seriously crossed the line as to be subject to a conviction."
If police are charged, they’re
very rarely convicted. The National Police Misconduct Reporting Project
analyzed 3,238 criminal cases against police officers from April 2009 through
December 2010. They found that only 33 percent were convicted, and only 36
percent of officers who were convicted ended up serving prison sentences. Both
of those are about half the rate at which members of the public are convicted
or incarcerated.
The statistics suggest that it
would be a truly rare situation if the officer who shot and killed Crutcher was
convicted of a crime. But video could potentially make a difference — as it did
for prosecutors who pressed charges over the police shootings of Samuel DuBose
in Cincinnati, Walter Scott in North Charleston, South Carolina, and Laquan
McDonald in Chicago.
