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10 years and thousands of police shootings result in only 54 charges against officers

Of the 54 charged officers, 21 were not convicted, 11 were convicted, 19 cases are still pending, and 3 cases are listed “other.”

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An analysis by the Washington Post and researchers at Bowling Green State University found that thousands of fatal police shootings in the U.S. since 2005 have resulted in just 54 charges against police officers.

Of the 54 charged officers, 21 were not convicted, 11 were convicted, 19 cases are still pending, and 3 cases are listed “other.”

The data shows that in “an overwhelming majority” of the cases in which officers were charged, the victim was unarmed. But the Post says that guilty verdicts against cops usually required more circumstantial evidence than that: the victim was shot in the back; video evidence was taken of the incident; or, as in 10 of the 54 cases, there was an incriminating testimony or evidence of an internal coverup.

The Post’s study comes just a week after a murder charge  was filed in South Carolina against officer Michael T. Slager. Slager was captured on camera shooting an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, multiple times in the back as he was running away.

“To charge an officer in a fatal shooting, it takes something so egregious, so over the top that it cannot be explained in any rational way,” Philip M. Stinson, a criminologist at Bowling Green who studies arrests of police, said in the Post’s article. “It also has to be a case that prosecutors are willing to hang their reputation on.”

More than three-quarters of the officers charged in fatal shootings since 2005 were white, while nearly two-thirds of their victims — 49 in total — were minorities, all but two of which were Black.

In the Post’s interviews with prosecutors across the country, nearly all of them said that race did not factor into their verdicts. But one defense lawyer, who represented a white officer charged in the 2013 killing of unarmed black man, spoke to a different point to view:

“Anytime you have politicians that have to make charging decisions, realistically that is part of their decision-making process,” Doug Friesen told the Post. “They are asking themselves, ‘Is there going to be rioting out in the streets?’ ”

The Post’s analysis did not examine each of the thousands of cases of police shooting in which no charges were brought against officers.

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