“More Accountability”: Police Shooting Shows Need For Major Changes, Advocates Say
There would have been no charges filed against a North Charleston, S.C., police officer this week without a video shot by a witness, many, including the mayor of North Charleston, are saying.
Video brings more accountability, and that’s why some South Carolina state lawmakers will be pushing hard next week to pass a bill requiring all law enforcement officers to wear body cameras.
But proposals beyond the body cameras are needed to ensure police accountability, some say. They say:
- State law should require that the State Law Enforcement Division, as an outside agency, investigate each time an officer fires a weapon in South Carolina.
- All police agencies should be required by law to collect racial profiling data and turn that over to SLED, as a previous state law intended.
The body camera bill will get a hearing in the state Senate as soon as next week and quickly move on from there, a key senator said Wednesday.
The bill, introduced in December by Senator Gerald Malloy (D-Darlington), already has had three hearings this year in a Senate Judiciary Committee subcommittee chaired by Senator Brad Hutto (D-Orangeburg).
Hutto said he hopes his committee soon will pass the bill out to the full Judiciary Committee, which could consider it later this month.
In his subcommittee’s three hearings on body cameras, Hutto said, most witnesses -– including many from the state’s law enforcement community -– expressed overwhelming support for using cameras.
Concerns, raised by victims advocate groups and others, include privacy and Freedom of Information request issues, as well as costs of the cameras and data storage, Hutto said.
A revenue impact study done for Malloy’s bill estimates it would cost some $21 million to equip most state and local law officers with body cameras the first year, and $12 million per year after that.
Malloy said any costs of body cameras should be balanced with the costs of unnecessary police shootings, follow-up investigations and bad publicity for South Carolina –- such as Wednesday’s New York Times front-page photographs from the video of a North Charleston officer shooting a man in the back as he runs away.
Body cameras will act as a deterrent and might well have prevented the North Charleston shooting, Malloy said. “If that officer in North Charleston had been wearing a body camera, I don’t think he draws the weapon,” he said.
“We know that body cameras work. Good police officers don’t really mind,” Malloy said. “Complaints go down from citizens, and officers can use the videos for training.”
Hutto is enthusiastic. Law officers who testified “before our committee thought it was a great idea. It helps gather evidence, it’s great for community relations, it’s good for officer safety, and it acts as a deterrent to bad conduct on the part of both officers and citizens alike,” he said.
Hutto downplayed the initial multimillion-dollar costs. After all, when the idea of police car video cameras were introduced years ago, many people said they would cost too much, Hutto said. But the state decided to pay most of the costs by enacting a one hudred dollar fee on people convicted of DUI, and that fee has substantially helped pay for police car videos –- which nearly everyone now agrees are a great asset, he said.
“Over the years, we’ve collected millions of dollars,” Hutto said. “The vast majority of the cars on the streets now, when the blue lights go on, the camera goes on.”
Senator Marlon Kimpson, whose district includes North Charleston, where the latest shooting took place, is a co-sponsor of Malloy’s body camera bill.
University of South Carolina School of Law professor Colin Miller said Wednesday he shows law students in his criminal law and evidence classes many videos of officer-involved shootings, but all up to now raise at least some possibility the officer had justification for shooting.
“As far as video clips I’ve seen, this (North Charleston clip) is probably the most compelling,” Miller said. “Based on what’s shown in the video, it looks a lot like a homicide.”
Meanwhile, Representative Joe Neal (D-Richland), a leader in the Legislative black caucus, said he is introducing legislation that would require an outside law agency to investigate any officer-involved shooting.
“That will help ensure some level of objectivity and fairness,” Neal said. “There are some departments that now insist they can do an in-house investigation. I don’t think any law agency should investigate itself.”
USC’s Miller said he strongly supports independent, outside investigations of officers involved in shootings.
Now, SLED investigates only at the invitation of local or other state police agencies.
SLED has no authority to take over an investigation, and local police are not required by law to report such shootings.
While all agencies can opt not to invite SLED in, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department routinely does not turn over investigations of its officer-involved shootings to SLED or another outside agency.
Sheriff Leon Lott said he turned to in-house probes starting in 2014 because he feels his department has the investigative expertise, a competent crime lab, and the public trust to conduct proper investigations of its own deputies.
Police face tough decisions and, often, heavily armed and dangerous criminals.
So it’s right that they are given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to spilt-second decisions, experts say.
Even so, charging, and convicting, an officer of mishandling a shooting incident is rare in South Carolina, experts say.
Police in South Carolina have fired their weapons at 209 suspects in the past five years, and a handful of officers have been accused of pulling the trigger illegally –- but none has been convicted, according to an analysis of five years’s worth of data by The State newspaper.
The solicitor for Charleston and Berkeley counties, Scarlett Wilson, has not brought charges against an officer in at least the past five years.
During that time, there have been 23 police-involved shootings there, 17 of them in Charleston County, according to SLED data from 2010-15 examined by The State.
With SLED investigating, there’s not only a better chance at accountability, experts say. There’s a better chance for better data collection and analysis.
With one agency in charge, there would be a central location for collecting information and, presumably, more consistency and better chances to spot a trend –- good or bad.
Because SLED’s data now comes in from the various agencies and often does not contain the race of the officers, for example, which makes trends or possible racial profiling difficult to detect.
Data collection matters, Neal said, whether from shootings or from traffic stops, for seat-belt violations or other reasons.
“There needs to be some teeth in the law,” said Neal, noting there is already a law but that it only applies to non-ticketed police encounters and has no penalty in it for agencies who do not report the data to SLED.
In 2005, Neal was part of an effort to include a provision mandating the collection of racial profiling data in a pending mandatory seat belt bill.
Although many white lawmakers objected, Neal and others supported a long-stalled bill mandating seat belt use after a provision stipulating law agencies must collect race data on encounters between police and citizens.
That provision required all state and local law enforcement agencies to complete a form listing the race of the driver in traffic stops in which a citation is not issued. Police already collect race and other data in most other stops involving a ticket.
But Neal said Wednesday the racial profiling measure in the seat belt isn’t working because only a minority of law agencies report that data to SLED as required by law.
During the past 15 years, there have been some 550 reported police shootings in South Carolina, SLED’s records indicate. That’s an annual average of 36 shootings.
Other information is more difficult to come by, gleaned only by digging through SLED’s voluminous files.
Last month, a University of South Carolina professor told The State that it is embarrassing that no one knows exactly how often police fire at or kill suspects in the United States or South Carolina, and that lack of sufficient information makes it harder to grapple with the controversial issue, a criminal justice professor said.
“The government is very aggressive about giving us numbers to protect us from the free market,” the University of South Carolina’s Geoff Alpert, a nationally recognized expert on police use of force issues, said in an interview. “But not much when it comes to our civil liberties.”
Malloy said he plans to introduce another bill next week in the Senate.
It will prevent police from charging bystanders with a crime if they are videotaping a police encounter with a citizen.
“It will allow our citizens to go on and break out their cameras,” Malloy said.
“Pictures are worth a thousand words,” the senator said. “And thank goodness for this picture.”
By: John Monk, The National Memo, April 9, 2015
“How Long Can This Go On?”: There’s No Such Crime As ‘Driving While White’
The shooting of Walter L. Scott in South Carolina prompts the question:
When is the last time you heard of a white man in a Mercedes-Benz being pulled over for driving with a broken taillight?
It has probably happened somewhere, sometime, but there’s a better chance of your car being hit by a meteor.
Getting shot dead during a minor traffic stop also isn’t a prevailing fear among white males in America, no matter what type of vehicle they own.
Scott himself didn’t imagine he was going to die when he was pulled over. Unfortunately, he happened to be a black man driving a Mercedes, which is what got him noticed. He was behind on child-support payments and probably didn’t want to go to jail.
Something happened at the scene, Scott got Tased and then tried to run away. Officer Michael Slager fired eight times, hitting the unarmed 50-year-old in the back. The killing was caught on cellphone video by a bystander.
Slager told the dispatcher that Scott had snatched his Taser, but the video shows the officer dropping an object that looks just like a Taser near Scott’s handcuffed body. Slager has been charged with murder and fired from his job.
The shooting was shocking to watch, as the whole world has, yet the sequence of events leading up to it is sadly familiar to black men in this country. They can’t afford to drive around as carefree as us white guys.
In September, a South Carolina state trooper shot and wounded another unarmed black motorist after pulling him over because he allegedly wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.
I’ve got white friends who rarely buckle up, yet I don’t know of one who has been ticketed for it, or even stopped and warned. Maybe they’re just lucky.
The black comedian Chris Rock uses his Twitter account to record his traffic-stop encounters. In a recent seven-week period, he was pulled over three times (once as a passenger).
It’s possible he and his friends aren’t very good drivers. It’s also possible they’ve been targeted merely for “Driving While Black,” an unwritten offense that still exists in many regions of the country, not just the Deep South — and not just in high-crime areas.
The odds would be fairly slim for a black man driving a luxury car not to be pulled over at least once on a road trip between, say, Utah and North Dakota. Even in a ’98 Taurus he’d need to be watching the rear-view mirror for blue lights.
Generalizing about traffic stops can be problematic. The numbers often spike in certain neighborhoods at certain times of day, and a small number of officers can account for many incidents of racial profiling.
Still, the evidence that it exists is more than anecdotal.
Using a “Police-Public Contact Survey,” the U.S. Justice Department analyzed traffic stops of drivers aged 16 or older nationwide during 2011, comparing by race and weighting by population.
To the astonishment of hardly anyone, black drivers were about 31 percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, and approximately 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than Hispanic motorists.
A series published by the Washington Post in September reported that minority drivers had their cars searched (and cash seized) at a higher rate than white drivers. That jibed with the Justice Department’s conclusion that vehicle searches occurred substantially more often when the driver wasn’t white.
Another unsurprising fact: Compared to other races, white drivers were most likely to get pulled over for speeding. Black drivers were statistically more likely to be stopped for vehicle defects or record checks.
Which is what happened to Walter L. Scott in North Charleston.
Never in almost five decades of driving have I been pulled over for a busted brake light or a burned-out headlight, even though I’ve had a few.
It didn’t matter whether I was in a Dodge, Oldsmobile, Jeep, Ford, Chevy or even, for a while, a Mercedes SUV.
The only thing I’ve ever been stopped for is, like many impatient white people, driving too fast.
And every time a police officer walked up to my car, I knew exactly why he or she wanted to chat with me. It was no mystery whatsoever.
That’s not always the case for a black man behind the wheel of a car in this country. This is not just a perception; it’s a depressing reality.
If it had been me or Matt Lauer or even faux Hispanic Jeb Bush driving that Mercedes-Benz in South Carolina, Officer Slager wouldn’t have stopped the car. Not for a busted taillight, no way.
Which prompts another question: How long can this go on?
By: Carl Hiaasen, Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, April 14, 2015
“Enough Is Enough”: Walter Scott’s Death Should End Public’s Denial Of Police Victimization Of Blacks
There is a phenomenon in the United States which most of the public is unwilling or unable to fully acknowledge. The killings by police of unarmed black men and boys is akin to climate change – for many, seemingly no evidence will convince them that there is a relationship between race and police violence. The justifiably outraged reaction to the apparent murder of Walter Scott suggests that the denial may be finally wearing off. Now is the time to confront that denial and ask whether the reforms that are typically called for are sufficient to combat an obvious disparate impact on black Americans.
For years black Americans and their allies have been saying that officers are killing blacks with impunity. The common reaction is to dissect each fatal encounter and explain what the deceased did to justify being killed. This allowed the majority of the public to disengage from the conversation and write off each death as the deceased’s fault. What the shooting of Walter Scott tore off was any pretense of a legal justification that he was posing an imminent threat to officer Michael T. Slager.
What is still missing is any evidence of racial motivation. The circumstantial evidence, though, is strong because each questionable death seems to occur when the civilian is black or brown be it on a New York City sidewalk, the back corner of a suburban Walmart, a park in Cleveland or a field in South Carolina. The recent President’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing addressed racial bias and recommended better collection of demographic data of police encounters and the racial composition of police departments and adoption and of policies prohibiting racial profiling. Those recommendations have to be expanded upon and implemented.
First and foremost, the dearth of data surrounding lethal use of force must be eliminated. Lawmakers have to force police departments to adopt a culture of transparency where a range of data including the use of force, traffic stops and complaints are made public.
Second, de-escalation tactics must always precede the use of force. The current legal justification for using both lethal and non-lethal force is very broad. As long as an officer can demonstrate that he feared an imminent threat of harm and it appears reasonable, he is not subject to any discipline for the use of force.
Third, addressing implicit bias through training may not be enough. What the Department of Justice investigation of Ferguson, Mo. clearly showed is that the bias can be very explicit. Departments have to adopt zero tolerance for racial bias and dishonesty and remove any officers from their forces when racial motivations or lying is uncovered.
Finally, investigations of deadly force incidents must be far more robust. In far too many troubling shootings, investigators are not willing to ask the officers the tough questions they would ask in any other homicide that did not involve cops but instead let them off the hook with softball questions.
There are no easy answers but the killing of Walter Scott demonstrates once and for all that some cops lie and murder and think they can get away with it. As long as the public was in denial that approach worked, now the burden is on all of us, police departments and their political leadership to say “enough is enough.”
By: Walter Katz, a former public defender, was part of a task force that challenged convictions in cases brought by corrupt Los Angeles Police Officers in the Ramparts case; Opinion Pages, Room for Debate, The New York Times, April 9, 2015
“The Expansive ‘Warrior’ Mindset”: Police Shouldn’t Ask If A Shooting Is Justified, But If It’s Avoidable
Every time a police shooting gets national attention, the difference in the conflicting attitudes that civilians and law enforcement have toward the use of force is glaring. That conflict drives much of the tension between police agencies and the communities they serve.
When cops evaluate a use-of-force incident, they ask whether it was justified, focusing on the legal rule set by the Supreme Court in the 1989 case Graham v. Connor. The Court held that officers may use force so long as it is “objectively reasonable.” To determine whether a particular action was objectively reasonable, the Court held, judges must view the situation through the deferential lens of “a reasonable officer on the scene.”
When civilians evaluate a use-of-force incident, they ask whether it was avoidable. They want to know whether the officer could have done something—anything—else.
The tragic shooting of Tamir Rice last November puts the difference between “justified” and “avoidable” in stark contrast. Officers responding to call that there was a “man with a gun” in a park drove to within about ten feet of their suspect. One officer jumped out of the car and, within two seconds, fatally shot the 12-year-old. Was it justified? Probably, if one narrowly considers the officers proximity to an apparently armed man. Was it avoidable? Almost certainly, when one acknowledges that the officers could have—and should have—parked at a safe distance and approached cautiously by using cover, concealment, and communication.
Why do most officers, charged with serving and protecting their communities, persist in asking whether a use of force was justified rather than necessary? I put a great deal of blame on the expansive “warrior mindset” that has become so highly esteemed in the law enforcement community. To protect themselves, to even survive, officers are taught to be ever-vigilant. Enemies abound, and the job of the Warrior is to fight and vanquish those enemies.
That’s not the right attitude for police. Our officers should be, must be, guardians, not warriors. The goal of the Guardian isn’t to defeat an enemy, it is to protect the community to the extent possible, including the community member that is resisting the officer’s attempt to arrest them. For the guardian, the use of avoidable violence is a failure, even if it satisfies the legal standard.
Society invests a tremendous amount of trust and responsibility into our police officers. Policing is a difficult job, not least because of the potential for violence that cannot be predicted or, in many cases, prevented.
But in the long run, it would be safer for everyone if officers saw their role as guarding the community, not defeating enemies.
By: Seth Stoughton, Professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law affiliated with the Rule of Law Collaborative. He served as a city police officer and state investigator: Opinion Pages, Room for Debate, The New York Times, April 9, 2015
“The Police Don’t Always Tell The Truth”: The Killing Of Walter Scott Sheds Light On The Problem Of Police Lying
Yesterday The New York Times published a video showing a police officer, Michael T. Slager, fatally shooting a black man, Walter L. Scott, as he ran away from the officer.
The video is disturbing enough by itself. But it becomes even more troubling when we consider how radically at odds the visual evidence seems to be with the police incident report filed on the killing. As the Times notes, Slager “said he had feared for his life because the man had taken his stun gun in a scuffle after a traffic stop on Saturday.” Yet the video shows Scott killed in flight, something like 20 feet away when the final bullet hit. After the shooting, Slager is shown placing an object next to Scott’s prone body. According to the Times, police reports also claim that officers performed CPR on Scott, an assertion not borne out in the video.
The death of Walter Scott will add more tinder to the already blazing political debate over police violence. The apparent contradictions between the incident report and the video highlight an overlapping but distinct problem: The police don’t always tell the truth. Police violence and police lying are two separate problems, although they also reinforce each other. Police violence flourishes in part because of the prevalence of police lying, which is rarely challenged by the criminal justice system.
In the Scott killing, there is good reason to believe that without the powerful counter-evidence provided by the video, which led to Slager being charged with murder yesterday, the police incident report would have been accepted as the official account of the shooting. Indeed, the persuasive power of police testimony extends outside official channels. Prior to the emergence of the video and Slager’s arrest, Slager’s version of events was echoed by the local media in South Carolina as if it were factual.
Police lying doesn’t just act as a shield for police violence, but as a larger source of corruption in the criminal justice system. Criminal cases are always narrative battles: Prosecutors and defense attorneys compete to win cases by presenting the most plausible stories consistent with admissible evidence. The police play a crucial part in this system as a supplier of narrative facts, in the form of both reports and testimony under oath.
As Ohio State law professor Michelle Alexander noted in a 2013 article in The New York Times, there is a powerful social presumption that we should put our faith in cops. “As a juror, whom are you likely to believe: the alleged criminal in an orange jumpsuit or two well-groomed police officers in uniforms who just swore to God they’re telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but?” Alexander said that this abiding faith in the police is misplaced: “In this era of mass incarceration, the police shouldn’t be trusted any more than any other witness, perhaps less so.”
Alexander’s contention rests on a strong scholarly literature about “testilying”—the practice of police officers committing perjury to secure a conviction, usually against someone they think is guilty. In a classic 1996 article for the Colorado Law Review, Vanderbilt Law professor Christopher Slobogin demonstrated that both “reportilying” (falsifying police reports) and “testilying” are pervasive in many American jurisdictions.
Police perjury, Slobogin argues, occurs because “police think they can get away with it. Police are seldom made to pay for their lying.” Not just prosecutors but even many judges see themselves as sharing a common set of goals with the police of making sure the guilty get punished. Working in a shared enterprise, they are loath to challenge police perjury. “Prosecutors put up with perjury because they need a good working relationship with the police to make their cases,” Slobogin notes.
Slobogin documented his case by citing a compelling 1992 study by Myron Orfield of the Chicago criminal justice system showing that a large percentage of judges, prosecutors, and defense attorneys acknowledge the reality of police perjury: “In his survey of these three groups (which together comprised 27 to 41 individuals, depending on the question), 52 percent believed that at least ‘half of the time’ the prosecutor ‘knows or has reason to know’ that police fabricate evidence at suppression hearings, and 93 percent, including 89 percent of the prosecutors, stated that prosecutors had such knowledge of perjury ‘at least some of the time.’”
If officer Slager did fabricate his incident report in the Scott killing, he wasn’t being a bad apple but rather adhering to a dishonesty that is all too common in American police forces. Such is the credence given to police reporting that Slager’s rendition of events was only overturned by the compelling counter-narrative offered by the video, shot by a civilian onlooker.
Videos, including police body cameras, are not a panacea to the problem of police violence. The 1992 Rodney King trial alone should remind us that compelling visual testimony can be overridden by the social trust many jurors give to police. Still, in a society where both the state and many citizens are too credulous about police testimony, videos are often the best way to break the stranglehold of the official narrative.
By: Jeet Heer, Senior Editor, The New Republic, April 9, 2015
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