Just weeks before residents of Atlanta shut down their own streets over the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in other parts of the country, Deravis Caine Rogers was shot dead by police in their own Georgia city.

He was African American, unarmed, and provided “no provocation” for the shooting, according to police.

His case didn’t attract the attention that other police shootings caught on cellphone videos have. But in a rare development, the officer who fired the gun, James Burns, has already been charged with murder and fired.

It is the first time in six years that a district attorney in Georgia has charged an officer without the officer first appearing before a grand jury for indictment.

“The decision of APD [Atlanta police department] to terminate and of DA Paul Howard to prosecute Officer James Burns for the killing of Caine Rogers does indeed mark an unprecedented shift in how Atlanta and Fulton County hold police accountable for their actions,” said Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, based in Atlanta.



Criminal charges against police for fatal incidents have been extremely rare nationwide. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis found that over a seven-year period ending in 2011, just 41 people were charged. During that same period the FBI count found that there were 2,718 “justified homicides” by law enforcement – a figure that is known to dramatically undercount police killings. A project by the Guardian found that in 2015 alone, there were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement.

On the day of the shooting, Burns had been called to an apartment complex after a report that a pedestrian was spotted looking into cars in a suspicious manner. Burns claims that when he arrived on the scene, a vehicle quickly pulled out of where it was parked, coming down the hill toward Burns’ car.



In Burns’s statement of events, he moved his car to try to block Rogers by pulling sideways in front of it, but Rogers continued past in what Burns called an attempt to run him over.



Deravis Rogers. Photograph: facebook

But in an investigation completed within several weeks of the incident that included review of dashcam footage, police found that Burns “had no provocation, no reason, to discharge his weapon”, according to Sgt Warren Pickard. They found that Burns was actually standing behind his own vehicle, not in immediate danger of being hit as he had claimed.

When asked by investigators why he chose to block Rogers’s car even though the radio report described a pedestrian and not a vehicle, Burns replied that he just thought “everyone in this area was of interest”.

Burns shot and killed Rogers through the passenger side window.

“The driver of the vehicle posed no immediate threat to you,” a disciplinary memo issued by Atlanta’s police chief, George N Turner, found.

The Fulton County district attorney, Paul Howard, issued an arrest warrant for felony murder, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and violation of his oath, and Burns turned himself in. He is being held in jail until a preliminary hearing on 1 August.

Bervera said the swift action is “a direct result” of community outcry in Atlanta and nationally.

But, she added: “Officer Burns didn’t operate in a vacuum – he was trained and supervised by higher-ups. The community should not be too quick to celebrate or think that justice has been done.”

Bervera contrasted Rogers’s case to another from more than a year ago. Alexia Christian was shot 10 times by two Atlanta police officers in April 2015 while she sat in the back of a squad car, and advocates have been calling for the release of videotapes associated with the death ever since.

Last week, Howard said he would not seek charges over Christian’s death. Police say Christian slipped her hand out of a handcuff and fired a pistol at the officers, provoking their gunfire.

Bervera called that investigation botched. In general, the department has been slow to discipline “any officer for any misconduct”, said Bervera.

Rogers’s father, Deravis Thomas, says he doesn’t want his son’s incident to be “swept under the rug” as others have been.

While Thomas commended Turner, the police chief, for swift disciplinary action, he called for greater accountability for officers involved in other shootings he said are just as unwarranted.

“You can’t have a police force policing the citizens of a city with the police believing that they can commit murder and just say some magic words – ‘Oh, I feared for my life’ – and it will disappear,” he said. “We need punishment and accountability, because that becomes a deterrent.

“Now you’ve got policemen that are getting shot … It’s terrible either way. A life taken is a life taken. The trust is gone.”