Many unjust verdicts across the years have exposed just how protected police misconduct is under the law.
Four LAPD Police Officers were acquitted of their assault on Rodney King - in spite of overwhelming video evidence that they used excessive force.
Four NYPD officers were acquitted after firing 41 shots at Amadou Diallo on the doorstep of his home. He was an unarmed model citizen.
Three NYPD detectives were acquitted on all charges after firing 50 shots into the car of Sean Bell on his wedding day. Everyone in his car was unarmed and leaving a bachelor party.
Even President George W. Bush said the decision not to indict NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo in the choking death of Eric Garner was "hard to understand."
In a study commissioned by the Washington Post, it was determined that less than one percent of police officers who kill people on the job ever serve a day in jail—even when overwhelming evidence proves they acted unlawfully.
Perhaps no police shooting in the history of America, though, was more egregious and excessive than that of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams by the Cleveland Police Department in 2012. Both of them were completely unarmed and parked when Officer Michael Brelo jumped on the hood of the car and fired 34 shots into the windshield, reloaded his gun, then fired 15 more. An 88 additional shots were fired by his fellow officers surrounding the vehicle.
For years, police have claimed that Timothy and Malissa shot at them from the car, but after no guns were recovered, no bullet or bullet hole from the guns ever found, and their hands were completely free of any gun residue, it was concluded that that this mystery gunshot was likely just their car, a 1979 Chevy Malibu, backfiring. Some even dispute that this took place.
On Saturday, Officer Michael Brelo was found not guilty of voluntary manslaughter in this shooting massacre. Taking nearly one hour to explain his decision, the judge stated that the prosecutors were simply unable to disprove Brelo's claim that he "feared for his life" and that the state was unable to prove that the 49 bullets which came from Brelo's gun were the ones that actually caused their death.
This decision to set Officer Brelo free, without any consequence whatsoever, sets a deep and frightening precedent. In essence, without true evidence that a grave threat exists, officers are now allowed to fire 137 shots into a vehicle and then claim they don't know whose shots actually did the deed. This verdict, if anything, actually encourages excessive force.
In my earlier article entitled, "How the white imagination of a black threat continues to make justice elusive," I pressed the case that justice will remain forever rare as long as an imagined threat is all police officers need to justify their violence.
As long as the law allows white men to act on their imagination of a black threat of violence, justice will remain a rare, elusive occurrence in America. It cannot and should not be enough for police or citizens to simply believe, based not on facts, but the possibilities of their own imagination, that they may be in grave danger at the hands of black women and men who actually posed no threat to them whatsoever.
The threat must be verifiably real, true, actual, factual, or it is, no matter how police unions or the members of the press who do their bidding want to spin it, unjust, through and through, to threaten, assault, or murder based on the disproven reality that a threat could've existed because your imagination said so.
What's troubling is that cities are completely willing to admit wrongdoing in thousands of cases of police violence as long as no officers actually serve time for it. Such was the case with Michael Brelo. The city of Cleveland
paid the families of Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams $3 million in a wrongful death settlement. Seventy-two officers connected to the case
have been suspended without pay. Yet not a single soul who fired a bullet at Timothy and Malissa on Nov. 29, 2012, has spent a single night in jail.
Advocates for incarceration consistently argue that harsh sentences are not just the price people should pay for the crimes they commit, but should serve as a deterrent to others who may consider such crimes. With this same logic, it's clear that police officers, who don't actually pay for these huge settlements themselves, have no effective deterrent to excessive force. If Officer Michael Brelo can be set be free for what he did, I'm afraid we have many more miserable days ahead.
How can anyone, absent an officer admitting that he is lying about being afraid, ever prove that police aren't acting out of fear? It's an unreasonably high hurdle and must be reconsidered.