In this op-ed, writer Zoé Samudzi explores the processes that keep police officers who kill from being held accountable.

After being fired on May 2 for violating Balch Springs Police Department policies, former police officer Roy Oliver was charged with murder for the shooting of 15-year-old Jordan Edwards in Dallas. If convicted, Oliver faces up to life in prison.

This accountability has been seen as some kind of movement toward justice by many activists, including local organizers mobilizing around police violence, because so many cases of police violence in the United States end with no indictment for the officers involved. But a guilty verdict of an individual officer is not an indictment of the brokenness of the American criminal justice system. Likewise, a guilty verdict is a reflection of both the individual innocence of a slain person and the exceptional guilt of the single officer in question, rather than a broader anti-racist critique of policing.

On June 16, Minnesota officer Jeronimo Yanez—the state's first officer charged in an on-duty fatal shooting—was acquitted of all charges related to the death of 32-year-old Philando Castile, who Yanez shot seven times at close range in an incident that was streamed live on Facebook. On May 3, the Department of Justice announced after 10 months of deliberation that Blane Salamoni and Howie Lake II, the two officers responsible for killing Alton Sterling, would not face federal charges. Despite graphic cellphone footage of the incident, the DOJ claimed evidence was insufficient to bear the heavy burden of proof under federal criminal civil rights law, and that the officers’ use of fatal force was considered “objectively reasonable” in the moment.

Tulsa Police Officer Betty Shelby killed Terance Crutcher in September 2016. AP

Sadly, but predictably, a jury acquitted Betty Shelby, the officer who was caught on video fatally shooting Terence Crutcher, of manslaughter on May 17 because her use of fatal force was “unfortunate, and tragic, but justifiable due to the actions of the subject.” She returned to work at the Tulsa Police Department, though not as a patrolling officer.

On May 19, a grand jury acquitted yet another police officer of responsibility for his participation in a fatal shooting. This time, Columbus, Ohio, officer Bryan Mason’s actions against 13-year-old Tyre King (both featured in this story's lead image) were found to be justified. Mason was also cleared of wrongdoing by the police in 2013 for a previous fatal shooting in 2012. (He was involved in two other non-fatal shootings in 2010 and 2013 and was, again, cleared in both cases.) Just two months prior to Mason's acquittal, a Columbus grand jury also failed to indict two plainclothes officers who fatally shot 23-year-old Henry Green V.

Police are not held accountable in courts because they are consistently not held accountable on almost every level, from sympathetic media accounts criminalizing black victims, to legal standards that make grand jury indictments incredibly difficult, to structural refusals to hold police accountable at a federal level. A 2016 investigation by In These Times found that indigenous people are even more likely than black people to be affected by police violence and the lack of accountability that follows, but both are significantly affected because of the unique nature in which anti-black and anti-indigenous violence are inextricably linked to the American system.

Former police officer and an associate professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University Philip M. Stinson is an expert on the legal and social-political systems that allow for so many law enforcement officers to evade accountability. He compiled data about officer arrests since 2005 that shows how officers constantly avoid punishment for illegal actions. He found that even arrests for drunk driving rarely end in convictions, and arrests or internal discipline for misconduct are more likely for veteran officers than rookie cops, who are often seen as more reckless and prone to violence. His research found that just 41 on-duty police officers were charged with either murder or manslaughter between 2005 and 2011, the same period in which the Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded several thousand justifiable homicides.