Title: Do Police Ever Get Indicted When They Kill People?
Headings: Do Police Ever Get Indicted When They Kill People?
Do Police Ever Get Indicted When They Kill People?
What people are saying

Content: An average of about 96 police homicides a year involve a white officer killing a Black person, according to a study done by USA Today. Before that, a report called “Operation Ghetto Storm” gathered information detailing that of the 739 “justified” shootings from 2007-2012, “313 of them were Black, 44 percent (136), were unarmed, 27 percent of them (83) were claimed by law enforcement to have a gun at the time of the shooting, but that could not be later confirmed or the ‘gun’ was in fact, a toy or other non-lethal object.” In recent years, a group called the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement released a report in 2013 revealing that police officers, security guards or self-appointed vigilantes killed at least 313 African-Americans in 2012, a rate of one every 28 hours. Because the FBI’s police homicide stats are collected from voluntary information given by police departments all over the country, it is only fair to be a bit wary of how many of the homicide are actually being reported. One of the few recorded cases ABS could find of a police officer actually being charged for the killing of a Black man is that of Justin Craven and Ernest Satterwhite. The 68-year-old Black great-grandfather was shot on February 9 of this year when he parked in his driveway after a slow-speed chase by a 25-year-old white police officer in North Augusta, South Carolina, who repeatedly fired through the driver’s side door, according to AP. The prosecution sought to charge Satterwhite with voluntary manslaughter, punishable by up to 30 years in prison. But the grand jury disagreed, indicting him on a misdemeanor, citing his use of excessive force and failure “to follow and use proper procedures.” A study on actual police indictments was done back in 1979, according to talkingpointsmemo.com, and only found three convictions out of the 1,500 police killings it studied over a five-year period. And none of those were killings of Black men.