Most Police Shootings Don’t Lead to Prosecution of Police

ALL GOV.

Criminologist Philip Stinson at Bowling Green State University reviewed 6,700 incidents of police being charged with a crime. Of this total, Stinson found only 41 officers indicted over a seven-year period for either murder or manslaughter in connection with on-duty shootings. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reported 2,718 justified homicides by law enforcement from 2004 to 2011, which was an incomplete count.

“It’s very rare that an officer gets charged with a homicide offense resulting from their on-duty conduct even though people are killed on a fairly regular basis,” Stinson, an assistant professor of criminal justice, told The Wall Street Journal.

Police advocates insist the total of officers charged with murder is so low because the shootings are “usually justified,” according to William Johnson, executive director of the National Association of Police Organizations. “Basically, that the officer acted in self-defense or the defense of another person.”

Samuel Walker, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at University of Nebraska, told the Journal that the lack of police prosecutions is “one factor that enters into the perception of African Americans that the police are not on their side,” and that “Shootings are really the tip of that iceberg, and all of that is where the anger came from in Ferguson.”

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