Today, Explained - 20 shots and a cell phone

Episode Date: April 4, 2018

289. That’s the number of people who have been shot and killed by police in 2018 alone. One of them was Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old black man from Sacramento. His death sparked a wave of protests and renewed scrutiny of the police. But less than one percent of those fatal police shootings result in charges. The Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery explains why convictions are even fewer, and what it’s going to take to reduce fatal police shootings. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know when your toothbrush gets kind of old and nasty and you chuck it in the trash? With a Quip electric toothbrush, you only chuck the head of the brush in the trash. So that's like half as wasteful. The Quip life starts at just $25 and that includes some free brush heads. So go to quip.com slash explained to learn more. Alexa, play the podcast Today Explained. Getting the latest episode of Today Explained. Here it is from TuneIn.

50 years ago today, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis. His speeches still sound like they could have been written yesterday. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, when will you be satisfied? We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied. Just over two weeks ago in Sacramento, California, the police received a call about a man behaving erratically. Hey, what's going on there?

Yeah, it's you guys going down the street breaking windows of cars. You busted both my truck windows out, and you busted into the people's backyard right now, across the street from my place. You busted two of my windows in, and you busted the car's window out across the street from me. Okay. I'm being cornered in people's backyard right now across the street from my place but two of my wonders any both the cars went right across the street from me okay born is in people's backyard right now do you know which yard he's in what the address is as they responded they encountered stefan clark at his grandmother's house he's standing on the side of his house he runs around to the back when he's encountered by police they follow him they, they pull their guns out.

One of the officers yells that they see a gun in his hand. They open fire 20 times. Stephon Clark's hit eight times, the majority of those times in his back, and he didn't have a gun in his hand. He had a white iPhone in his hand, right? And so this was something that immediately sparked tension in the community. One, that he had been shot at so many times. Two, when the body camera video was released, seeing how quickly the interaction happened, but then also that he hadn't been offered any medical aid for about six minutes after he was shot. And then the third thing that really upset people was at the end of the video, the officers walk into the street and they're talking to each other and one officer signals to the other they should mute their microphones. We've seen two weeks of protests. We've seen protests that shut down entrances to the Sacramento Kings basketball games. One of the first shootings

in the era of Donald Trump to kind of break through and capture our national attention. Wesley Lowry covers police shootings for the Washington Post. He says there's a lot about Stephon Clark's shooting we still don't know. The police have said they think Stephon Clark may have been the person they'd gotten the call for. And you can see in one of the videos that he kind of is hopping some fences to get back to his grandmother's house right before he's encountered by the police. So he could have been the person who the call was for, but there's still some lack of clarity there.

Okay. You know, Stephon Clark's a 22-year-old black man, father of two. He was living with his grandmother, lived in that area. And so he's killed in the backyard of his own home, essentially. And I think that has been really what's upset a lot of people. His family has been very active in these protests and these demonstrations. His brother interrupting city council meetings and giving speeches. Stop, stop, stop, stop, y'all. Stop, please. My brother just got shot. Talking about how upset and how frustrated they are that their brother, their son, their grandson would be shot this many times standing unarmed in his own backyard.

And we just a couple of days ago got an autopsy report. What did it show? So the way this works is that when someone's shot and killed, there's the formal kind of medical examiner's autopsy. But then after that, especially in a kind of contested or disputed case, the family will often employ a doctor to conduct their own autopsy. In this case, the independent autopsy confirmed that a good number of these bullets struck Stephon Clark in his back, in his side. What the attorneys for his family would argue is that that begins to undercut the argument the police are making, that he was charging at the officers or he was facing

the officers with something shining in his hands. Well, if that was the case, the family might argue, why are all these shots in his back? Even if he was facing the officers for the first shot, if he spun around after the first one or is now facing them in the back, why was it necessary to keep shooting? You mentioned that the officers in the Stephon Clark shooting were wearing body cams. So it seems like that might be a city that was trying to take action to prevent this kind of thing. Certainly. So one of the reasons there are body cameras in Sacramento is because of a series of shootings that had happened in 2014, 15 and 16 in Sacramento, specifically the shooting of Joseph Mann, who had some mental illness, I think was holding a knife. And it was a shooting that

had prompted protest in the city. And in response to that, the police chief decided that they would adopt a body camera policy, every officer was going to wear one, and that it was going to be their policy to always release the videos of these types of shootings. Now that they got these new protocols in place, we want to see what kind of justice we're going to get now. That's true. Okay?

So we don't get any more justice. And do these body cams help? Do we see some sort of correlation between body cams and shootings going down? Everyone who's studied it so far, and body cameras are still relatively new in policing, right? But most studies we've looked

at don't lead us to believe that body cameras lead to fewer shootings. In a post-Ferguson world, a lot of people held body cameras out as a thing that they either thought was going to limit the number of shootings, like people, if they knew they were being watched, they would kill fewer people. In reality, what's happened has kind of been the opposite. More shootings are being caught on camera.

And by a function of that, the public now has questions about additional shootings, right? And so you think about some of the shootings in the last few years that gained attention, Philando Castile or Alton Sterling or Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte, and those were shootings that were of black men armed with a gun, right? That without a video, in fact, we wouldn't have questioned it at all. Well, the police said this black guy with a gun threatened them, right? Right. What cameras have allowed the public to do is to ask questions about shootings they might otherwise not have been able to. So you mentioned the shooting of Alton Sterling, and that one's actually been in the news a bunch

recently too, right? Yeah. So this shooting was in July 2016, and Alton Sterling was a man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was selling CDs outside of the Triple S convenience store. It's a market and a gas station in Baton Rouge. And the police get a call about someone who had threatened someone with a gun. There were cell phone video initially of the end of that interaction. So that's a video that we all saw two years ago. Sterling being tackled to the ground,

them wrestling, and then the shooting happening. Did he have a gun? He did have a gun in his right pocket. And did he have a permit for the gun? Alton Sterling, I believe, had a previous felony conviction. So he wouldn't have been able to legally own or possess a gun either way. And so no, I think is the answer to that.

It was found in his pocket. And so it never came out of his pocket at any point in the struggle. And so there's this question of, was he actually trying to make a move for the gun? Or was this something that the officers just perceived or said leading to the shooting? The state investigators announced earlier this year that they were not going to charge these officers. But as they did that, they revealed that there was additional video footage that we all hadn't seen. And so last week, the local officials, the police announced they were going to fire the officer and that they were going to release this

additional video from the body cameras of the officers. Now, when they released this video, we saw all types of new details about what had happened. The primary new video comes from the body camera of Blaine Salamone, who's the officer who shoots and kills Sterling and is fired. And Salamone, you see, pulls up to this interaction where his fellow officer's already talking to Alton Sterling, immediately runs up to him, pulls his gun out. Excuse me, ma'am. Do me a favor, put your hands on that car right quick. Stop.

Stop. What you talking about? Put your hands on the car right quick, bro. You know, like, immediately kind of escalates this interaction. I'm saying what I do is don't fucking move. I ain't don't fucking ask. Hey, bro, put your fucking hands on the car. Put your fucking hands on the call. Put your fucking hands on the call.

Just to be clear, at this point, he hasn't really done anything. He's selling CDs outside of a convenience store. Exactly, and officers have walked up to him conceivably to investigate a call that has happened. And this is in Louisiana. This isn't in New York City where you might be surprised to see someone with a gun outside of a convenience store. This is in Louisiana where that's pretty surprised to see someone with a gun outside of a convenience store. This is in Louisiana, where that's pretty pedestrian to see someone with a firearm. At this point, it's still in his pocket. So they don't even necessarily know that the call is valid. And what we see in this video is Sterling seems to put his hands on

the car, but they're having some type of struggle. They're grabbing at him, they're touching him. And at some point, Salamone again says to his fellow officer, you know what, tase him. They tase Sterling twice. Now Sterling's a pretty big guy. Tasers don't always work. Sterling is able to get up off of the ground after being tased

and seems to be standing there kind of with his arms up a little out in front of him, kind of a, hey, what in the world's going on type posture. At which point this officer, Salamone, tackles him to the ground and they begin wrestling. And that wrestling match is what leads to the shooting at the end. We had all been led to believe in the public that we had no idea what had happened in the minutes leading up to the shooting, right?

That the video wasn't going to show us anything. But in reality, what the video showed was that this officer, from the moment he arrived, escalated the situation over and over and over and over again, ultimately leading to the wrestling match that leads to Sterling being shot and killed. I do think it kind of fundamentally changed our understanding of what happened. That shooting in 2016 came, I'm forgetting now, but maybe the same week or the week after Philando Castile? It was the day before.

It was the... Okay, sorry. No, exactly. It was the... Those days were like July 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th, right? Where you had the shooting of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and the video being released. The way they killed him was in cold blood. You know it, I know it.

And then you had like the next night, Philando Castile in Minnesota, that shooting, the live Facebook feed of him being shot. My son loved this city, and this city killed my son! And the murderer gets away! And then, like, two days after that, you have the shooting of these officers in Dallas. And so this was this moment where the frustration that had been boiling

completely kind of poured over the sides of the bowl. This is the America I know. And today, in this audience, I see people who have protested on behalf of criminal justice reform, grieving alongside police officers. I see people who mourn for the five officers we lost, but also weep for the families of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. In this audience, I see what's possible. And it felt like something could happen.

Yeah. And then nothing happened. Exactly. And now it feels like this issue has just sort of gone away. July 2016 is like light years ago in the world we live in now. Yeah. What we saw at the time was the White House was kind of willing to put its foot on the scale a little bit. It was holding convenings of Black Lives Matter activists and law enforcement. They were trying to push kind of proposals for reform. Then the entire world changed, right? You end up with Donald Trump becoming the president and an

attorney general, Jeff Sessions. Jeff Sessions has said many times, he doesn't believe in these collaborative police reforms. He doesn't believe it's the job of the federal government to be investigating police departments. He went from having a White House that was pursuing this issue carefully, you know, police are still upset with how Obama did this. Sent Eric Holder to investigate Michael Brown. Exactly, right? You know, Obama would walk to the microphones and talk about these issues in a way that he didn't have to. Right. And by the very presence of him talking about this, it created more attention to these issues. He hosted these forums and these conversations in the Oval Office after this. After Alton Sterling, he had a marathon three or four hour meeting with activists and police officials in the White House that he personally moderated to try to find common ground on these issues. I can't quite fathom Donald Trump hosting a meeting like that. There's also just so much happening every single day. The media attention is also gone. A video like Stephon Clark's, which a year ago,

or two years ago, or three years ago, would be still looping on cable all day, every day, probably, frankly, only got played a few dozen times on cable, in part because probably in the time we've been in here having this conversation, a cabinet secretary has been fired on Twitter, or someone new has been indicted in a Russian conspiracy to undermine our democracy. Or a mass shooting. Well, exactly. And so there's been so much going on that it's been very difficult, I think, for some of these issues to have staying power,

especially when they're issues the White House doesn't seem to care about right now. The most frustrating thing about these kinds of shootings is that they just keep happening. Nothing really seems to change. Hardly anyone is ever convicted. And there's a really simple legal explanation for that. It's just ahead. We'll see you next time. A man don't tweeted, I just ordered a Quip toothbrush and I'm really excited. LMAO skull emoji. Sarah Garlick at Yellow Cardigan tweeted,

Okay, whomst has the Quip toothbrush and do you like it? Please and thank you. Great news, Sarah Garlick. Saman Jabari tweeted, I know it's a podcast toothbrush, but I really like Quip. They send you the new brush heads every three months, too. I know it's a podcast toothbrush, but I really like Quip. They send you the new brush heads every three months, too. I know it's a podcast toothbrush, too, Saman, but you can get some of those new brush heads for free right now

if you go to getquip.com slash explain. This is Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm, and I'm talking to Wesley Lowry. He's a reporter at The Washington Post. They've made a database of police shootings, and they looked closely at when those shootings are followed up by charges against the officer involved. We could only find 54 cases of an officer being charged in connection to a shooting between 2005 and 2014. If you extrapolate our data backwards a little bit, there are about 1,000 fatal police shootings a year.

This is a 10-year period, so about 10,000 fatal police shootings maybe. Like I said, we don't know that for sure because we weren't measuring historically, but we know what the rate is. Out of those perhaps 10,000 fatal shootings, 54 officers are charged. Like I said, we don't know that for sure because we weren't measuring historically, but we know what the rate is. Out of those perhaps 10,000 fatal shootings, 54 officers are charged. So half of 1% of the time. The conviction rates are about half of that. And that conviction rate includes very often plea deals to lesser charges, right?

And so you're not talking about half of those 54 being convicted of murder or manslaughter. You're talking about half of them having any legal repercussion. And so the reality is it's very, very extremely rare for both an officer to be charged, but then after that for an officer to, in a court of law, be held accountable for a shooting. Bringing this back to Stephon Clark and the shooting in Sacramento, is that kind of shooting legal? Is that justifiable for the officers? I think that it's going to be not necessarily easy, but it's not going to be surprising if they can successfully argue that this was a justified and illegal shooting. Right. Generally, right, so there are two big Supreme Court cases that govern the legality of police use of force.

The first being Tennessee v. Gardner. The consolidated case, Mr. Klein, you may proceed whenever you're ready. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court. People remember this as like the fleeing felon case where an officer shot a fleeing teenage boy who had just robbed a house. He had like a purse and $10 and he's running. He then begins to jump and vault over the fence, which time the officer fires. And unfortunately, it resulted in the death of the suspect. At the time, Tennessee – the laws in Tennessee allowed for an officer to shoot anyone who had committed like a crime. It didn't really matter.

And the ruling of the Supreme Court was that Tennessee law was too broad, that police use of lethal force was only legally justified if a reasonable officer would believe there was some type of imminent or immediate lethal threat to either the officer himself or to someone else, right? So if you see someone with a machete charging at someone, that would be a justified use of force because there's an eminent threat to someone else. But a case where someone is otherwise unarmed and just running away, there is no eminent lethal threat. The second thing we talk about a lot is, and it is a second case. When is therene Graham versus M.S. Conner. When is there liability in a civil suit? When can I sue a police officer for excessive force? As opposed to criminal suits.

Exactly. And in Graham versus Conner, a man who is a diabetic and his blood sugar is low, and so his friend takes him to a gas station to buy orange juice. Upon arriving there, he noted that because of a line, it would take him a long time to get his orange juice. He became concerned and ran to his friend's car and motioned for him to take him to his girlfriend's house. Well, a police officer sees this, thinks, well, that was suspicious, the way this guy just kind of ran into this grocery store then ran out didn't buy anything so he follows them pulls them over uh asked the guy to get out of the car and during the process of this handcuffs him and puts him in the back of the um patrol car

there might be some struggle he's roughed up a little bit ultimately um he this man sues and says this was excessive force this was unreasonable unreasonable. I had committed no crime. Why was I handcuffed? Why was there any interaction? And so what the officer argued was that this was suspicious behavior, that this guy kind of walks in the store, walks out really quick. Maybe he had taken something. He didn't know what was wrong with Petitioner. It might be an insulin reaction, a sugar reaction.

He'd never seen one. He was scared. He didn't know what to do. He asked for Officer Connor's help. Supreme Court rules in Graham v. Connor is that a police officer can be held civilly liable only if the behavior that the police officer exhibits would be unreasonable and another officer would not have done that based on the information that they have at the time. So one of the big things about Graham versus Connor is it adds in this question about hindsight and 2020 vision. And it rules explicitly that you cannot, when judging an officer's liability, you cannot

superimpose 2020 vision. You can only think about what the officer knew at that moment. That sounds like carte blanche to do whatever you want whenever you want to. More or less. And in combination, these two things do begin to largely create a pretty permissive system where our officers do have a lot of leeway to do what they want. And so applying these two standards to the Stephon Clark case, for example. In this case, you have officers who, and it is dark outside, they've gotten a call about someone who maybe has a crowbar or something breaking into home.

So they're thinking they might be encountering someone with a weapon and they run into someone who runs away from them and turns around. What these officers are likely going to say is that they saw something in his hand. They thought it was a gun. It does not matter under this law if they were wrong that it wasn't a gun, right? So Graham versus Connor, right? There's no hindsight 2020.

If in the moment your partner says that guy's got a gun, then an otherwise objectively reasonable officer, if your partner is telling you a guy's got a gun, you're going to pull your gun and start firing at him, right? And that's going to be the question, right? The way police are trained, they are supposed to fire until the threat is otherwise neutralized, right? Until there's no more threat. And so that's why very often the public ask questions like, why didn't they shoot that guy in the leg? Or why would you shoot so many times? The way most police officers are trained is that once you're firing, you're firing until no one's moving anymore, right? And I think we

see that very often in these cases. People say, why did they shoot so many times? Because this is actually their training. And that's important because again, the standard is what would another officer do in the same situation? If every officer has been trained the same way, that's important because, again, the standard is what would another officer do in the same situation? Right. If every officer has been trained the same way, that's also what that officer would have done conceivably. It sounds like what you're saying, Wesley, is that it's probably going to go the same way this always goes. It seems highly unlikely to me that these officers will be charged. Again, I, you know, I know better than to try to play prediction games like with something like this.

You never really know. But knowing what the law is, knowing what the case law is that governs this, it seems very unlikely. And again, that's not me saying that there shouldn't be charges or these shootings should be legal. But under the way the laws are written currently, most of these shootings we're watching on video are not illegal. Obviously, this is bad for the Sacramento Police Department. They're having a tough go right now. They've placed these officers on leave. They've got national media attention in the worst way.

Everyone loses when someone who is holding a cell phone is shot by police officers. And yet it keeps happening again and again and again. I think that sometimes what we forget is how big and massive these systems are. And also because of the way our nation is governed, where we largely rely on local government and policing is run almost exclusively via local government, that you can have a department that makes a bunch of changes in response to something. And that can change nothing about how the next department over behaves, right? There are 18 to 19,000 police departments in the United States of America. So one or two departments

getting body cameras or one or two departments sending their officers to retraining does almost nothing to reform policing. And I think that's something that sometimes we miss, is how deeply complicated it is to make a wide-sweeping change in an industry like policing because you have to convince 18,000 police chiefs and sheriffs to change their department. One thing I always encourage people who are interested in this to look at are their police union contracts. Police union contracts get renewed about every two years, two or three years in almost every locality. And what's interesting is that over the last 20 or 25 years, especially during the economic downturn, when cities couldn't grant raises to their officers, the police unions were able to backload all types of stuff into their contracts.

And so you see contracts, for example, where an officer can't be interviewed for 48 hours after a shooting. Well, that seems kind of crazy to most people, right? If I walk outside right now and murdered someone, I couldn't go to the police and say, I'll talk to you guys in 48 hours, right? There's no way, there are places where they have to purge embarrassing information from officers personnel files after a certain period of time. There are places where exactly how long of a break in the midst of their interrog into these binding contracts. But that's the type of thing that if you and seven of your friends in your suburb wherever get really worked up about, maybe your city council will strip some of that out, right? And so there is some, again, it's the blessing and the curse of our small government world where if seven people care about something somewhere, you can probably change the way

it works where you live. Wesley Lowry writes for The Washington Post. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. one last message about quip before we go. A Quip toothbrush weighs just three ounces. It's got silent, sensitive vibes. If you like the three-ounce, silent, sensitive types, you can make the switch to a Quip toothbrush starting at just $25. And if you sign up now, you'll get some free refills. Go to getquip.com slash explain to learn more.