It happened two years in a row: a Black person shot and killed inside their own home by a white police officer in Texas.
In 2018, off-duty Dallas officer Amber Guyger—who said she mistook her neighbor’s apartment for her own—opened fire and killed Botham Jean, a Black man who had been watching television and eating ice cream in his apartment.And in 2019, just two weeks after Guyger was convicted of murder, a Fort Worth officer shot and killed a Black woman, Atatiana Jefferson, through a window of her house as she was in her bedroom playing video games with her eight-year-old nephew.
Those two cases dominated the conversation on police use of force last year, but there was much more happening away from the cameras: according to the Washington Post’s “Fatal Force” database, 931 people around the country were shot and killed by police in 2019 (compared to 992 in 2018), and there were countless other accusations of excessive force leading to injury.A large proportion of the victims continued to be people of color—especially Black people, who made up at least 23 percent of those killed despite comprising only about 13 percent of the population—as well as those with mental illnesses or disabilities.
Very few police officers have been held accountable for such deaths over the years.But, after five hours of deliberation, the Dallas jury found Guyger—by then off the force—guilty of murder after a highly publicized trial.But although Guyger faced life in prison and prosecutors had asked for no less than 28 years, the jury sentenced her to only 10.“No justice, no peace” chants echoed outside the courthouse as many expressed outrage at what they called a lenient sentence, while others pointed to Jean’s brother Brandt—who hugged Guyger at the end of his victim impact statement and said he forgave her—as proof that the sentence was appropriate.
The outrage would grow just 10 days later when police officer Aaron Dean shot Atatiana Jefferson after responding to a call from a concerned neighbor about an open front door.She was the sixth person to be killed by the Fort Worth police in four months; four of the six were Black.City officials quickly decried the shooting, and Dean—who resigned before he could be fired—was charged with murder, and was indicted by a grand jury in December.
Other cases of officer-involved shootings proceeded during the year. In March, former Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld was found not guilty on all charges stemming from the fatal 2018 shooting of unarmed Black teenager Antwon Rose II.Rose, 17, was shot three times as he ran during a traffic stop.In May, former Arlington, Texas, police officer Bau Tran was indicted on charges of criminally negligent homicide in the fatal shooting of 24-year-old Black man O’Shae Terry during a traffic stop.Tran had been responding to a call for backup in 2018 when he shot five times into Terry’s SUV as it started to move forward, killing him.
In July, four Chicago police officers were fired after an independent board ruled they had tried to cover up the 2014 shooting of Black teenager Laquan McDonald.In an attempt to help fellow officer Jason Van Dyke—who shot 17-year-old McDonald 16 times and was convicted of second-degree murder in 2018—the four officers exaggerated the threat the Black teenager posed, the board said, falsely reporting that McDonald had attempted to stab VanDyke and another officer.Dash-cam footage of the shooting showed McDonald walking away from officers.
In October, Seattle police officer Jared Keller was cleared of wrongdoing by the Seattle Office of Professional Accountability in the killing of Iosia Faletogo, who was shot and killed in 2018 while fleeing the scene of a traffic stop.Faletogo, who had been forced to the ground by six police officers, dropped a gun after one officer warned him that he was going to be shot; roughly 20 seconds later, Keller fired a single shot, killing the 36-year-old Samoan American.An investigation into the shooting found that Faletogo had been moving his hands in a way consistent with reaching for the handgun on the ground.
There were also developments in the five-year-old case of Eric Garner, a 43-year-old Black man who was killed by a New York City police officer who put him in a chokehold while trying to arrest him on charges of illegally selling loose cigarettes on Staten Island.In July, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced it would not prosecute Daniel Pantaleo, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) police officer who killed Garner.Pantaleo had already avoided criminal charges back in 2014 when a grand jury declined to indict him.
The DOJ had been considering charging him with violating Garner’s civil rights, but U.S. Attorney General William Barr decided to drop the case.The next month, following an internal disciplinary trial, Pantaleo was fired from the NYPD and stripped of his pension benefits for violating the police department’s ban on chokeholds.Then, in August, the final police disciplinary case over Garner’s death concluded when Sergeant Kizzy Adonis, who had arrived on the scene as police forced Garner to the ground, pleaded no contest to failure to supervise and was ordered to forfeit 20 vacation days.The case that helped fuel the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement had finally officially closed.