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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/28/hunted-one-in-three-people-killed-by-us-police-were-fleeing-data-reveals">theguardian.com</a>
<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">‘Hunted’: one in three people killed by US police were fleeing, data reveals</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Sam Levin - July 28, 2022<br></div><p>Two recent cases have sparked national outrage and protests. In Akron, Ohio, on 27 June, officers fired <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/04/jayland-walker-shooting-body-cam-video-outrage">dozens of rounds at Jayland Walker</a>,
who was unarmed and running when he was killed. And last week, an
officer in San Bernardino, California, exited an unmarked car and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jul/19/police-killed-robert-adams-black-man-running-san-bernardino-california">immediately fired at Robert Adams</a> as he ran in the opposite direction.</p><p>Despite
a decades-long push to hold officers accountable for killing civilians,
prosecution remains exceedingly rare, the data shows. Of the 2,500
people killed while fleeing since 2015, only 50 or 2% have resulted in
criminal charges. The majority of those charges were either dismissed or
resulted in acquittals. Only nine officers were convicted, representing
0.35% of cases.</p><p>The
data, advocates and experts say, highlights how the US legal system
allows officers to kill with impunity and how reform efforts have not
addressed fundamental flaws in police departments.</p><p>“In 2014 and
2015, at the beginning of this national conversation about racism in
policing, the idea was, ‘There are bad apples in police departments, and
if we just charged or fired those particularly bad officers, we could
save lives and stop police violence,’” said Samuel Sinyangwe, a data
scientist and policy analyst who founded Mapping Police Violence, but
“this data shows that this is much bigger than any individual officer.”</p><h2>‘Hunted down’</h2><p>US police <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killings-us-vs-other-countries">kill more people in days</a>
than many countries do in years, with roughly 1,100 fatalities a year
since 2013. The numbers haven’t changed since the start of the Black
Lives Matter movement, and they<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/30/us-police-killing-people-high-rates"> haven’t budged since George Floyd’s murder</a> inspired international protests in 2020.</p><div><span><img alt="People wearing yellow t-shirts marching. Some of them are holding placards." src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/9508facdd832f3f3f3ec945fdf809f25462cd94a/0_336_7279_4368/master/7279.jpg?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=5d0cf689728c4de8f9698162fd94665f" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="235"></span></div><span></span></div><span>People in Newark, New Jersey, march demanding justice for Jayland Walker in July 2022.</span> Photograph: Michael M Santiago/Getty Images<p>The law has for years allowed police to kill civilians in a wide variety of circumstances. In 1985, the US supreme court <a href="https://apnews.com/article/fires-pittsburgh-us-news-il-state-wire-shootings-fb33a7eb824b47c492f01130c73878eb">ruled</a>
that officers can use lethal force against a fleeing person only if
they reasonably believed that person was an imminent threat. But the
court later said that an officer’s state of mind and fear in the moment
was relevant to determining whether the shooting was warranted. That
means a killing could be considered justified if the officer claimed he
feared the person was armed or saw them gesturing toward their waistband
– even if it turned out the victim was unarmed and the threat was
nonexistent.</p><p>As a result, very few police officers get charged.
Adante Pointer, a civil rights lawyer, said it was not hard for officers
to prevail when the case boiled down to what was going through the
minds of the officer and victim in the moment: “The only person left to
tell the story is the cop.”</p><p>In 2022 through mid-July, officers
have killed 633 people, including 202 who were fleeing. In 2021, 368
victims were fleeing (32% of all killings); in 2020, 380 were fleeing
(33%); and in 2019, 325 were fleeing (30%), according to Mapping Police
Violence. The data is based on media reports of people who were trying
to escape when they were killed, and it is considered incomplete. In
roughly 10% to 20% of all cases each year, the circumstances surrounding
the shootings are unclear.</p><p>Black Americans are disproportionately
affected, making up 32% of individuals killed by police while fleeing,
but only accounting for 13% of the US population. Black victims were
even more overrepresented in cases involving people fleeing on foot,
making up 35% to 54% of those fatalities.</p><p>“If
a person is running away, there is no reason to chase them, hunt them
down like an animal and shoot and kill them,” said Paula McGowan, whose
son,<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/07/vallejo-police-shooting-bike-ronell-foster-willie-mccoy"> Ronell Foster</a>,
was killed while fleeing in Vallejo, California, in February 2018. The
officer, Ryan McMahon, said he was trying to stop Foster, a 33-year-old
father of two, because he was riding his bike without a light. Within
roughly one minute of trying to stop him, the officer engaged in a
struggle and shot Foster in the back of the head. Officials later
claimed that the unarmed man had grabbed his flashlight and presented it
“in a threatening manner”.</p><p>“These officers are too amped up and
ready to shoot,” said McGowan, who for years advocated that the officer
be fired and prosecuted. Instead, the officer went on to shoot another
Black man, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/01/the-life-and-death-of-rapper-willie-mccoy-executed-by-police">Willie McCoy</a>,
one year later; he was one of six officers who fatally shot the
20-year-old who had been sleeping in his car. The officer was terminated
in 2020 – not for killing McCoy or Foster, but because the department
said he put other officers in danger during the shooting of McCoy.</p><p>The city paid Foster’s family $5.7m in a civil <a href="https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/5-7-million-settlement-reached-in-2018-vallejo-police-shooting-death-of-ronell-foster/">settlement</a> in 2020, but did not admit wrongdoing. A lawyer for McMahon previously <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/may/19/us-police-shootings-george-floyd-press-releases-reports">said</a>
the officer was attempting to “simply talk to Mr Foster” when he fled,
adding that McMahon “believed his actions were reasonable under the
circumstances”.<strong> </strong>Vallejo police did not respond to a request for comment.</p><p>“Not
only do these officers get away with it, they get to move on to bigger
and better jobs while we’re left shattered and are still trying to pick
up the pieces,” said Miguel Minjares, whose niece, 16-year-old Elena
“Ebbie” Mondragon, was killed by Fremont, California, police.</p><div><span><img alt="Selfie of a woman pouting into the camera." src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/e20011178cd6703813b4cbd02fedc33e128cb6b2/0_0_642_591/master/642.jpg?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=ac297e8e11ee8f0647b24c310749e162" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="361"></span></div><span></span><span>Elena “Ebbie” Mondragon was killed by Fremont police in March 2017.</span> Photograph: courtesy of Miguel Minjares<p>In
March 2017, undercover officers fired at a car that was fleeing,
striking Mondragon, who was a passenger and pregnant at the time. The
officers faced no criminal consequences. One sergeant went on to work as
a sniper for the department, though has since retired, and another
involved in the operation continued working as a training officer,
records show.</p><p>“You shoot into a moving car, which you shouldn’t
have done, and you weren’t even close to hitting the person you were
trying to target. And now you’re a sniper?” said Minjares. “When I hear
sniper, I think of precision. It boggles my mind. It shows the
entitlement of officers and the police department – they just put people
where they want them, it doesn’t matter what they did. It’s confusing
and it’s heart wrenching.”</p><p>In June, five years after the killing,
the family won $21m in a civil trial, but it’s unclear if Fremont has
changed any of its policies or practices.</p><p>A Fremont spokesperson declined to comment on the Mondragon case and did not respond to questions about its policies.</p><h2>The push to prevent the killings</h2><p>In
the rare cases when prosecutors do file criminal charges against police
who killed fleeing people, the process often takes years and typically
concludes with victory for the officer, either with judges or
prosecutors themselves dismissing the charges with or jury acquittals.</p><div><span><img alt="A young man wearing dark blue graduation robes poses on the street." src="https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/6206d00792fa939ea5c8c4f9717273e2c27b52de/0_0_720_558/master/720.jpg?width=620&quality=85&fit=max&s=ac2b0205bd44c1f50998929a60749216" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 25px;" width="392" height="304"></span></div><span></span><div class="gmail-container" dir="ltr" lang="en"><div class="gmail-content"><div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div tabindex="0" id="gmail-maincontent"><span>Robert Adams, 23, was fatally shot by police as he ran away.</span> Photograph: Courtesy of family<p>In
one Florida case where an officer was investigating a shoplifting and
fatally shot a man fleeing in a van, prosecutors filed charges and then <a href="https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/12/orlando-police-release-statement-after-manslaughter-charge-dropped-against-officer/">dropped the case</a>
a week later, saying that after a review of evidence, it “became
apparent it would be incredibly difficult to obtain a conviction”. In a
Hawaii case where officers killed a 16-year-old in a car, a judge last
year <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/08/20/1029620496/3-honolulu-police-officers-fatally-shot-teen-trial-iremamber-sykap">rejected</a> all charges and prevented the case from going to trial.</p><p>For
the nine fleeing cases where officers were found guilty or signed a
plea deal, the conviction and sentence were much lighter than in typical
homicides. A Georgia officer who killed an unarmed man fleeing on foot
was <a href="https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/2019/10/19/ex-kingsland-ga-police-officer-sentenced-to-year-in-prison-4-years-probation-for-killing-unarmed-man/2492480007/">acquitted of manslaughter</a>
in 2019, for example, but found guilty of violating his oath and given
one year in prison. A San Diego sheriff’s deputy pleaded guilty earlier
this year to voluntary manslaughter after he killed a fleeing man, but
he avoided state prison, instead getting <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-02-07/former-san-diego-deputy-sentenced-to-probation-jail-in-killing-of-fleeing-man">one year in jail</a>. And a Tennessee deputy, <a href="https://newschannel9.com/news/local/trial-underway-for-former-grundy-county-deputy-in-womans-2017-death?6ea9ab1baa0efb9e19094440c317e21b">found guilty</a>
of criminally negligent homicide after shooting at a fleeing car and
killing the passenger, a 20-year-old woman, was sentenced to community
service.</p><p>With the criminal system deeming nearly all these
killings lawful, advocates have argued that cities should reduce the
unnecessary police encounters that can turn deadly, with measures such
as ending traffic stops for minor violations and removing police from
mental health calls. There has also been a growing effort to ban
officers from shooting at moving cars.</p><p>California passed a law in 2019 meant to <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/19/california-use-of-force-law-stephon-clark">restrict use of deadly force</a>
to cases when it was “necessary” to defend human life, not just
“reasonable”. The law stated that an officer can kill a fleeing person
only if they believe that person is going to imminently harm someone.
The new law also dictated that prosecutors must consider the officer’s
actions leading up to the killing, which police groups had argued<strong> </strong>were irrelevant under the previous standards.</p><p>But
after its passage, police departments across the state refused to
comply and update their policies, said Adrienna Wong, senior staff
attorney at the ACLU of southern California, which backed the bill.
That’s only now starting to change after years of legal disputes.</p><p>“I
think we’re going to start to see prosecutors consider all the elements
of the new law, but I’m frankly not holding my breath based on the
track record of prosecutors in the state. We never thought this law was
going to be a full solution.”</p></div></div></div>
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