Caesar Goodson, the third Baltimore police officer to be tried for killing Freddie Gray, was acquitted on June 22nd, indicating that the most serious charges are not likely to end in convictions. Photograph by Patrick Semansky / AP

Three Baltimore police officers have been tried for killing Freddie Gray, and none have been convicted. These trials took place in a city radicalized by Gray's death and during a summer when the pattern of police officers killing African-American men around the country has not ceased, but the protests in Baltimore have been muted. The third trial, of an officer named Caesar Goodson, was considered the signal one. Goodson faced the heaviest charges, since he drove the paddy wagon in which Gray, his hands and legs shackled but his body not belted in place, was allowed to bounce around, restrained from protecting himself, until he suffered a fatal injury to his spinal cord. There are four more trials to come (three defendants have not yet had their cases brought to court, and a fourth, William Porter, is scheduled for a retrial this fall). But Goodson's acquittal, on June 22nd, indicated that the most serious charges are not likely to end in convictions. Whatever justice for Freddie Gray's death looks like, it will probably not involve long prison sentences for cops.

The proceedings in Baltimore seem especially significant after the police killings of Alton Sterling, in Baton Rouge, and Philando Castile, near Minneapolis, and the assassination of five Dallas police officers, events backgrounded by a sense that the tension between law enforcement and the African-American community remains unresolved. The trials of the Freddie Gray officers have taken place in a city that has met many of the demands that protesters have made elsewhere. Baltimore’s state’s attorney, a thirty-six-year-old African-American woman named Marilyn Mosby, was elected by a progressive coalition, defeating a white incumbent whom her campaign attacked for being too reflexively pro-cop. Mosby brought charges against the officers three weeks after Gray's death, the grand jury delivered indictments three weeks later, and the first case opened five months after that. Defense motions to move the trials to Baltimore’s more conservative suburbs were denied.

The judge who presided over all three cases is an African-American man named Barry Williams, who worked in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice during the Clinton Administration, and was dispatched around the country to help prosecute cases of police misconduct. One officer who was prosecuted by Williams years ago told the Baltimore Sun that, if he were one of the Freddie Gray defendants facing Williams, "I'd want to move my trial." Nevertheless, officers Edward Nero and Goodson chose to have Judge Williams hear their case (a trial by bench), rather than face a jury, and in each case he found them not guilty. Officer Porter had a jury whose racial composition was close to Baltimore’s: there were seven African-American jurors and five white ones, in a city that is sixty-three per cent black. Only one juror held out to convict Porter of manslaughter, the most serious charge he faced—the other eleven all voted to acquit. Baltimore did get to try its own accused police officers, as the demonstrators had demanded. The results will probably not look like justice to them.

Each police killing illuminates some aspects of the general pattern of police killing and obscures others. No one cop killed Freddie Gray. His death was instead assembled piecemeal, with several different officers involved in a sequence in which Gray was pursued arbitrarily, arrested roughly, secured improperly, and driven callously, and in which officers ignored first his cries for help and then his silence. A "reasonable officer" in Goodson's position, Judge Williams found, could not be expected to quiz the cops who detained Gray or check to be sure that a prisoner had been securely detained. His training, in Williams’s view, had not required it.

The trial of the highest-ranking officer charged in Gray’s killing, Lieutenant Brian Rice, began last Thursday. Prosecutors dropped a misconduct charge on the first day of the trial, and Williams, who again is ruling from the bench, dropped a second-degree-assault charge against him on Monday. In their opening remarks, the prosecutors argued that, because of his rank, Lieutenant Rice had a greater responsibility than the others to insure Gray’s safety. Maybe they will succeed. But, given the outcomes of the previous trials, it seems more likely that Williams will acquit—that the attempt to find an individual responsible for collective negligence, for a slaying by increments, may fall short again.

Mosby was widely lauded when she first announced the indictments (among other things, she was profiled in Vogue), and it seemed at the time as if the Freddie Gray case might be the moment when the criminal-justice system caught up to the problem of police killing. Now that promise has faded, and the case mostly represents the ways in which everyday police neglect can elude criminal justice. Mosby could not put the state on trial in the aggregate, only six individual cops, each of them only partly culpable. A chant rang out during the Baltimore protests in particular: "We won't stop until killer cops are in cell blocks." But despite the resonance and political influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, that hasn't actually happened, in Baltimore or elsewhere.

In certain ways, Freddie Gray’s killing did not resemble other high-profile police killings, in which, usually, it has been possible to pinpoint a single lethal act and a single actor. Rather, it evoked the general pattern of police harassment, the slow lean of cops on members of a community they find suspicious. The outcomes of the trials suggest that the criminal-justice system may not be so well-equipped to counteract that culture. The pressure to fix it falls on politics.