Title: Few Police Officers Who Cause Deaths Are Charged or Convicted - The New York Times
Headings: Few Police Officers Who Cause Deaths Are Charged or Convicted
Few Police Officers Who Cause Deaths Are Charged or Convicted
A wide gulf remains between the public perception of police violence and how it is treated in court.
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One Officer Charged in Breonna Taylor Case
Daniel Cameron, Kentucky’s attorney general, announced that a grand jury indicted one officer on criminal charges in the fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor.

Content: On top of that, misconduct and poor judgment do not always amount to criminality. Though state statutes vary, officers are generally permitted to use deadly force if they reasonably perceive imminent danger — a standard that has been criticized as overly subjective and prone to racial bias. “Police know what to say and what to tell a jury and what to tell a judge to make those folks believe that they were reasonably in fear,” said Kate Levine, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. “ Even if there are other witnesses, those witnesses just don’t get the same amount of credibility determination from prosecutors, judges, juries.” Law enforcement officers kill about 1,000 people a year across the United States. Since the beginning of 2005, 121 officers have been arrested on charges of murder or manslaughter in on-duty killings, according to data compiled by Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Of the 95 officers whose cases have concluded, 44 were convicted, but often of a lesser charge, he said. Image
Law enforcement this month escorted Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer accused of killing George Floyd. Credit...
David Joles/Star Tribune, via Associated Press
Convictions include cases like the killing of Laquan McDonald in Chicago, for which Jason Van Dyke was sentenced to nearly seven years in prison, and the killing of Justine Damond in Minneapolis, for which Mohamed Noor was sentenced to 12.5 years. Many officers who avoided criminal convictions have been fired, like three of the other officers in the McDonald case, and Daniel Pantaleo, who used a chokehold on Eric Garner on Staten Island.