The Crime Report (https://thecrimereport.org/tag/police-shootings/)
A Dallas Morning News investigation found that families of the five Dallas cops slain in July, 2016 received only 22 percent of the $3.2 million donated to two charities set up to help them. The rest went to telemarketing firms.
Involvement in traumatic events like shootings can lead to years of anxiety and worse for police officers. Austin Police Chief Brian Manley, acting on an increase in alcohol-related incidents among officers this year, says he has made their mental health a priority.
Why did homicides increase in 2015 and 2016? Some blame the opioid epidemic and others point to the “Ferguson effect” on police, but criminologists say neither explanation is supported by data.
Officers “need to be conscious of the fact that literally every single person they come in contact with may be carrying a concealed firearm,” says John Jay College criminologist David Kennedy. According to Vox.com and University of Chicago criminologist John Roman, the stronger the gun control laws, the fewer police killings.
When police kill unarmed civilians, the path towards accountability begins with prosecutors. Elected to serve their communities as the chief law enforcement official, they have the means and mandate to confront the injustices that arise from systemic racism, writes the director of John Jay’s Institute for Innovation in Prosecution.
“Everybody knows that we’re getting killed regularly out here,” says Tanya Faison of Sacramento’s Black Lives Matter. The city’s first black police chief defends his department as protests erupt across the country.
Police officers still are killing U.S. civilians at about the same rate as they did in 2015, but attention to the Trump administration has forced police violence and criminal justice reform more broadly out of the headlines.
A noted criminologist finds a useful lesson for law enforcement agencies trying to address use-of-force incidents in a speech given by former President Dwight Eisenhower half a century ago.
Even small changes in police procedures, like requiring officers to carry hemostatic bandages in patrol cars to help shooting victims—including those they shoot—can have a large impact on how cops are seen by communities, and how they see themselves, a Fordham Law School panel was told Wednesday.
If cops charged with fatal shootings rarely get convicted, is there a better way of dealing with such incidents before they happen? According to a study published this month in the Annual Review of Criminology, there is.