Jump in charges, firings of cops in killings result of street protests

BY SETH GALINSKY

Three times as many police officers were charged with murder or manslaughter for on-duty shootings in 2015 than the annual average since 2005. This fact, the result of the explosion of protests against cop killings and brutality across the country, is documented by Philip Stinson, a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

According to Stinson, only 47 police officers nationwide — not counting FBI or immigration cops — were charged with murder and/or manslaughter from 2005 to 2014, about 4.7 a year. In 2015, he said, the number of indictments jumped to 18.

“In the past, the police’s own narrative and versions” of shootings at their hands has “rarely been challenged in any successful way,” Stinson told the Militant in a phone interview March 14. That’s not news to working people, who know that the so-called justice system is stacked in favor of the cops and prosecution.

In the first three months of this year four more cops have been indicted, Stinson said.

The reason for these changes, he says, isn’t that cops are killing more people. “The citizenry, media, and even the courts are much more skeptical of police claims of justification after having shot and killed someone,” he said.

Of the cops charged in on-duty shooting deaths some 22 percent have been convicted, Stinson said. On Feb. 11, New York City cop Peter Liang became the first cop in the U.S. since 2013 to be convicted for killing someone while on duty. Liang shot and killed Akai Gurley in the stairwell of a Brooklyn apartment building.

In the wake of nationwide protests, the propertied rulers have taken steps to rein in wanton acts of police brutality. The demonstrations have encouraged the willingness of witnesses to record and publicly release videos of police abuse.

In some well-publicized cases, even when charges are not filed, killer cops have been fired or forced to resign. None of the Cleveland police who shot Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams in a hail of 137 bullets in 2012 were convicted for their deaths. But in January this year six of the cops were fired.

Between 900 and 1,100 people are shot to death by cops in the U.S. every year, the Washington Post reports. About half of those killed are Caucasians and about one-quarter are Blacks.

In a related development, New York City police stops and street interrogations known as stop and frisk are down dramatically. The New York Civil Liberties Union reports that stop and frisks peaked at more than 685,000 stops in 2011. Since then, under pressure from street protests and outrage over police brutality, city officials ordered a shift in policy. By 2015 the number of reported stops had dropped to under 23,000.

The protests over the last two years, from Ferguson, Missouri, to Baltimore, and Staten Island, New York, have had an impact across the U.S. and around the world. Last year Ethiopian Jews in Israel held protests under the slogan of Black Lives Matter after cops beat an Ethiopian-Israeli soldier.

In Council, Idaho, a farm town of about 800 people, demonstrators protesting the November killing of cattle rancher Jack Yantis by sheriff deputies carried signs that said, “Ranchers Lives Matter.” In Paradise, California, friends of Andrew Thomas, a Caucasian youth, protested his death at the hands of cop Patrick Feaster with signs that said, “All Lives Matter.” These protesters weren’t counterposing these slogans to “Black Lives Matter,” but drew inspiration from growing actions across the country against the killing of Blacks.

Related articles:
Minnesota action: ‘Prosecute cops for murder of my brother’
Oregon probe whitewashes cop, FBI killing of Finicum
‘Fire NY cops who killed Ramarley Graham!’

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