A trigger-happy Texas cop who killed a black woman while investigating an open door at her home was convicted by a jury of manslaughter on Thursday, December 15, 2022 (read story here).
A neighbor had made a non-emergency call to 911 in the early hours of October 12, 2019, upon seeing an open door at Atatiana Jefferson’s home. The dispatcher treated it as an “open” call instead of a non-emergency welfare check, which turned it into a possible burglary in the minds of the responding officers.
Fort Worth, Texas, ex-police officer Aaron Dean said he killed Jefferson because she pointed a gun at him. The officers were walking around outside, and didn’t identify themselves, so Jefferson got her gun because she heard noises outside.
But her 11-year-old nephew said she had it at her side, and didn’t point it. Bodycam footage didn’t show that Dean saw a gun pointed at him. It showed he opened fire almost instantly upon shining his flashlight on her face in a window. (Wikipedia has more details of the incident here.)
Those facts turn this into a trigger-happy cop case. The case also is racially tinged because Dean is white, and Jefferson was black; and prosecutors argued that Dean acted hastily because he had “preconceived notions” about the neighborhood where Jefferson lived.
Dean (photo, right, shown in court yesterday), who was relatively new to the police force, probably should never have been hired as a cop. He had a misdemeanor battery conviction for touching a woman while in college, and training supervisors had concerns about his judgment.
After the Jefferson shooting, the Fort Worth PD was going to “dishonorably discharge” him for policy violations, but he preempted that by resigning.
But Dean will never be a police officer again with this manslaughter conviction on his record. He’s also going to serve prison time for Jefferson’s death, although probably not enough to satisfy her relatives or racial justice advocates. Prosecutors charged him with murder, but the jury only found him guilty of the lesser charge, and the most he can get is 20 years but it’ll probably be substantially less.
If you compare that to the 22 years given ex-cop Derek Chauvin for intentionally killing George Floyd, that’s probably fair in proportional terms, because Jefferson’s death had an accidental element to it. But accidents like this shouldn’t happen. Imposing criminal responsibility for “manslaughter,” short of “murder,” is how the law treats taking a human life through extreme carelessness.
At least he’s being held responsible. Police departments across the country are facing manpower shortages from some cops quitting because of Covid-19 mandates (how can you be a police officer, interacting with the public, if you won’t get vaccinated or wear a mask?) and prosecutions of killer cops, but those are people you don’t want in police uniform anyway.
I’ve long argued on this blog that American policing needs to reform the recruiting, training, supervision, and discipline of police officers.
It’s clear that in some cases the wrong people are being hired; in some cases, police agencies even hire officers fired by other departments to save training costs. In many states, this “revolving door” keeps the unwitting public exposed to bad cops. The manpower issue is serious, but employing people unsuitable for police work is a cure worse than the disease.
I don’t want to spend a lot of space here on politics, but it’s not possible to have an intelligent conversation about this country’s police without saying Republicans are doing a very poor job of responding to legitimate policing issues. They’re demanding unqualified support for police, good and bad cops alike, and condone racist policing. That’s not remotely good enough.
As citizens, we should support police when they do a good, professional job. We need them to protect us and keep crime in check. But we also need to protect our communities, and especially people of color, from bad cops — i.e., racist cops, trigger-happy cops, abusive cops, and killer cops.
We have such cops in many of our police agencies, and the discussion needs to be about purging that rot from our police services. And I believe prosecuting trigger-happy cops for unlawful killings definitely should be on the table. At present, we simply can’t get Republicans on board with cleaning up bad policing, and holding violent cops responsible for their criminal actions. They simply aren’t taking a responsible approach to the very real problems with our policing, which is yet another reason to not vote for them.
That’s all I’ll say about it for now.