A stacked deck: How police forces get away with killing more than 1,000 Americans a year — (Business Insider)

ISAAC SCHER

JUL 1, 2020, 12:58 AM

Police kill an average of around 1,000 people every year.

While most people who kill are investigated and possibly prosecuted, police have their own rules.

A system of legal rules and prosecutorial discretion help police officers legally justify most killings and remain on the force, criminal justice experts told Insider.

Police forces also dominate local and state politics, allowing them to stay unaccountable to the public and kill with de facto impunity.

Because police violence is racialized, “equal justice under the law doesn’t really appear to apply if you are a melanated person,” said Kristina Roth, a researcher at Amnesty International.

Daniel Gillis “was not in the right frame of mind” on his last morning alive, Jacquelyn Sykes, his widowed partner, said.

It was a Friday, one of the first days of the school year in 2017, and Gillis was getting ready to leave Pittsfield, Massachusetts. “He was meant to be going up to Boston for work,” Sykes told Insider in a phone interview. The pair had raised three children together – she had two girls from a previous relationship, and he had a daughter. “My children absolutely adored him,” Sykes said. “When Danny was sober, Danny was an awesome person.”

Danny, 36 and white, needed to “get out of his rut” in Pittsfield, where he worked construction after a six-year stint in prison on a drug charge, and moving to Boston would “better his life.” But he’d gone out drinking the night before he was killed, distraught about leaving Sykes and her daughters. He was still drunk when Sykes got home from work around noon the next day. Worse, he’d taken her anxiety medications: …Valium, Prozac, and hydroxyzine.

She got him in the car and drove toward her mother’s house, “just to get him out of there.” But he grabbed the steering wheel on the way, trying to crash the car. Then “he ran back to the house, where he found more medicine,” she said. “That’s when I called the police.”

What happened minutes later is the same thing that happens to more than 1,000 Americans each year: Police shot and killed him.

If a civilian shoots and kills someone, they are typically arrested, investigated, and possibly tried for murder.

That’s not what happened to Gillis’s killer. The Pittsfield Police Department said Gillis may have committed “suicide by cop,” blaming him for his own death, and prosecutors found the explanation reasonable. None of the officers involved were charged with a crime.

The legal system stacks the deck in favour of police officers who shoot and kill

Gillis’s case illustrates the layers of legal protection given to police officers who kill civilians.

In Gillis’s case, as with similar ones across the United States, the police cited a familiar reason to justify using deadly force: He had a weapon.

Like one-in-four of those killed annually, Gillis was mentally distraught. “He was suicidal” that day, Sykes said. When the first two officers arrived at his house, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen. But Sykes was able to disarm him. “Here I am, never trained, nothing,” she said.

Gillis ran back inside and got a smaller knife. When he came out again, several other officers were on the scene. They surrounded him in the yard and told him to drop the weapon, video footage shows. He stumbled, Sykes said, and Officer Christopher Colello shot him seven times in two seconds.

“Gillis suddenly charged at the officers while brandishing a knife,” the Berkshire County District Attorney said. “Colello acted lawfully in defence of his fellow officers.”

Neither Colello nor the Pittsfield Police Department responded to requests for comment.

Gillis’s case was unlikely to result in charges against the officers because federal law justifies deadly force when “a reasonable person would consider [the threat] likely to cause death or serious bodily harm.”

But the “reasonableness” standard is vague and broadly applied when police kill civilians, according to John Raphling, a criminal-justice researcher at Human Rights Watch.

“For practical purposes, it amounts to: They have to be able to describe to convincingly describe a good reason why they used force,” Raphling told Insider. That description can be as simple as showing that “any reasonable officer would have acted the same.”

Because of this vague standard, prosecutors don’t even bother trying the case.

Even if a police department doesn’t discipline a police officer for misconduct, prosecutors can still press charges if they believe an officer unjustly killed someone.

But the “reasonableness” standard holds sway over prosecutorial decisions. If a “reasonable officer” can justify the killing, the prosecutor might not bother pressing charges.

The prosecutor’s logic in such cases is that “we are not going to file charges because we’re not sure we’re going to be able to get a conviction,” according to Raphling, who was a trial lawyer for 20 years before joining Human Rights Watch.

A police officer crosses police tape at the scene of a police killing in Boston, Massachusetts, on September 29, 2019.

There were more than 1,000 “known police killings” every year from 2013 through 2019, according to Mapping Police Violence, most of them shootings, according to the Washington Post. Ninety-nine per cent of those cases never resulted in criminal charges.

Officers who shoot and kill civilians are “even more infrequently convicted,” Kristina Roth, a criminal-justice researcher at Amnesty International, said in a phone interview.

“Deadly force should be reserved as a last resort,” Roth said, “and that force should be necessary and proportional.”

“There’s no state that meets [that] standard,” she said.