WASHINGTON POST
As the use of deadly force by police once again roils the nation, the number of fatal shootings by officers increased from 465 in the first six months of last year to 491 for the same period this year, according to an ongoing two-year study by The Washington Post. This year has also seen more officers shot and killed in the line of duty and more officers prosecuted for questionable shootings.
Two years after a white police officer fatally shot a black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., the pace of fatal shootings has risen slightly, while the grim encounters are increasingly being captured on video and stoking outrage.
A Post database that tracks fatal shootings by police shows a 6 percent increase in the number of such deaths during the first six months of 2016, compared with the same period last year. Fatal encounters are strikingly similar to last year’s shootings: Blacks continued to be shot at 2.5 times the rate of whites. About half of those killed were white, and about half were minorities. Less than 10 percent of all those killed were unarmed. One-quarter were mentally ill.
But there are notable differences: More of the shootings were captured on video, 76 in the first half of 2015 and 105 in the first half of this year. And the number of fatal shootings of black women, such as that of Jessica Nelson-Williams in San Francisco in May, has risen. Nearly the same number of black women have been killed so far this year as in all of last year — eight this year, compared with 10 in all of 2015.
Training reforms, which the White House and police chiefs have embraced, are rolling out in a slow, scattershot fashion. There are about 18,000 police departments in the nation, many with their own training academies and unions, making it impossible for them to move in lockstep.
In 2016, fatal shootings by police are increasingly captured by cameras, a Post analysis shows. In the first six months, at least 105 shootings have been recorded in whole or in part by police-worn body cameras, surveillance cameras, cameras mounted on patrol cars or bystanders’ smartphone cameras.
At this point last year, that number was 76.
The biggest shift has been in the use of body-worn cameras: 63 of the shootings were recorded in this way through June, compared with 34 for the same period in 2015.
The videos have been a linchpin for prosecutors, activists and city mayors who want to hold police chiefs and officers accountable for questionable shootings. In the past 18 months, murder and manslaughter charges brought against officers in fatal shootings have tripled, while the presence of video evidence in these cases has doubled, a Post analysis shows.
James Alan Fox, a criminologist from Northeastern University in Boston, said he is not surprised that the rise of video has so far had no impact on the number of fatal shootings. He thinks cameras may affect police behavior in “routine, calmer situations,” such as during interactions with motorists who are complying with traffic stops, but not in more intense encounters.
“Once an officer feels they are in danger, or their emotions get elevated, then video is not paramount in their mind,” Fox said. “Then, they would tend to act more instinctively than deliberately.”
Edwin Lindo, who serves on the San Francisco Bar Association’s Criminal Justice Task Force and took part in a hunger strike to protest Gongora’s and Woods’s deaths, said older officers are not being properly retrained. Yet these senior officers are typically paired with rookies to provide them with on-the-job training, he said.
“The new recruits come out of the academy with new training. But the old guard tells them, ‘That’s nice what you’ve learned about de-escalating things, but you need to shoot before they shoot you,’ ” Lindo said. “The old guard corrupts the new rookies.”