Criminal convictions for police-involved deaths are rare. Each year, about 1,000 police shootings result in fatalities, says criminologist Philip Stinson of Bowling Green State University. Between 2005 and 2017, just 82 police officers were charged with murder or manslaughter for an on-duty shooting, and only 28 of them were convicted. It’s remarkable that recent weeks have seen the convictions of officers in two different high-profile shooting cases, reports Governing. A jury found Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke guilty of second-degree murder and 16 counts of aggravated battery with a firearm in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald. In August, a Texas jury’s decision led to a 15-year prison term for a former police officer in the fatal shooting of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards.
“There has been change overall from just a few years ago,” says University of Pittsburgh law Prof. David Harris. In the past, he says, police misconduct incidents were viewed as a “one-off.” Now, due to national media attention and public protest, more people look at these incidents as “symptoms of a larger set of issues.” On the other hand, “I definitely don’t think you can say there’s a trend [toward more police convictions] with this limited data,” says John Burton of the National Police Accountability Project, which helps people file civil misconduct cases. When convictions do happen, they tend to follow special circumstances that were present in the two recent cases: Both received national media attention and involved police statements that conflicted with video footage. The cases also involved white officers and black victims, included at least one black juror and took place in big metropolitan areas. In general, prosecutors are overwhelmed with criminal cases, and “it’s against [their] interest … to prosecute the police officers they work with everyday,” says Vida Johnson, a criminal defense attorney and law professor at Georgetown University.