Charges against police officers who kill citizens are rare. Only nine officers were indicted for officer involved shootings last year. Officer Michael Slager was one of them. He was charged with murder in state court last year.Slager was filmed by a bystander with a cell phone camera shooting a fleeing Walter Scott, an unarmed Black man, in South Carolina last summer.
At the federal level, indictments can be equally elusive, particularly for violations of civil rights, which are turned away 96% of the time. Today, when the federal grand jury announced a 3-count indictment of Slager, including criminal deprivation of civil rights, Chris Stewart, an attorney for the Scott family, shared his thoughts with the Washington Post.
“Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, all of them, every significant case the Justice Department has investigated and no indictments came down. This is the first time that an indictment has come down in a national case,” Stewart said. “I’m still in a state of shock … I don’t know in the past 20 years out of thousands of allegations of police misconduct how often this has happened, if it ever has. The biggest thing is that the general public must understand is how monumental this is.”
Monumental, indeed.
In research conducted by Bowling Green State University criminal justice professor, Philip Stinson, discovered only 1.7% of officers arrested between 2005 and 2011, were charged with civil rights violations.
Prosecuters are not seeking the death penalty, but if convicted, Slager could spend the rest of his life in jail.
The two other counts against Slager were: using a gun during the civil rights offense, and obstructing justice by lying to investigators about the fatal shooting.
Slager says that Scott reached for his Taser and they struggled before he shot him. The cell phone video shows Scott running away before being struck by 5 .45 caliber bullets from behind.
“Just that three seconds of the video came out. And everybody thought I was racist, and I just got out of my car and just shot him in the back for no reason,”Officer Michael Slager told NBC News in a Skype interview from jail last September.
“That’s what makes me upset is that nobody knows what actually happened,” he said. “But now it’s gonna come out.”
Yes it will. May justice prevail.
Featured image by Charleston County Sheriff
