Many Shootings, Few Prosecutions

After Ferguson, police chiefs faced intense pressure to reduce the number of police shootings. Many invested in stun guns. Some departments revamped training or tightened rules on when officers could use force.

“If we see an awful thing happened somewhere else in the country, that’s going right to my academy director,” said Chief Ed Roessler of the Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia. “How can we prevent this from happening here? Is our policy strong enough?”

Still, police shootings have not slowed.

Since the beginning of 2015, on-duty law enforcement officers have fatally shot more than 4,400 people, or around 985 annually, with little variation from one year to the next, according to a Washington Post database that is relied on by government officials, researchers and activists. It is not clear whether those figures are higher or lower than before the Ferguson shooting because no one kept reliable data in 2014 or before.

Amid the steady pace of shootings, criminal charges against the involved officers have remained rare, and convictions rarer still. Philip Stinson, a former New Hampshire police officer who is now a professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University tracking manslaughter and murder charges against the police going back to 2005, said there had been no significant uptick in such prosecutions since Ferguson. Last year, he counted 10 officers arrested on murder and manslaughter charges, roughly one officer for every 100 deadly shootings.

There are, however, anecdotal signs of a small shift: Three officers were convicted of murder and sentenced to prison in the past year. Before that, Dr. Stinson had counted only one other murder conviction for an on-duty shooting since 2005.

Change and Resistance

When Chris Magnus, then the police chief in Richmond, Calif., attended a protest in uniform and held a “Black Lives Matter” sign five years ago, the response from the local officers’ labor union was swift condemnation.