I find this so depressing. He’s not even convicted of “endangering safety by discharging a firearm?”? Seriously?
There is something about the justice system and those who comprise it (including jurors and potential jurors, i.e., society at large) that seems to make it nearly impossible to convict police officers of these crimes. I’m very distressed every time such a verdict comes in.
talk about appalling and disgusting…how is this possible? I mean, even with institutionalized racism it’s pretty mindblowing.
When I saw the headline I avoided reading any actual articles for as long as I could.
It seems that what it comes down to is that a police officer’s irrational fear of black men is a good enough excuse for killing them.
What will it take to actually convict a cop for shooting a citizen who did nothing wrong? Castillo did everything he was supposed to, and the forensic evidence contradicted the defense version of events. Castillo never touched his gun. This cop had no business being one. He was scared out of his mind by a black man going about his business and doing nothing to provoke him. Guys like the cop are a menace with their guns and power to take lives without consequences.
Daily I lose more faith in the humanity of my countrymen.
Sigh, Ive run out of things to tell my son to do when he encounters a nervous cop. Clearly they know a jury will always believe the ole “I feared for my life”. Im so angry.
From the nytimes
“How precisely he had moved his hands”… there is no way he could have reassured a bad cop in that situation. If he has to reach for his wallet, he could be reaching for anything and that’s the extent of the thinking in that cop’s brain.
He should have left his hands on the steering wheel, perhaps with both middle fingers extended, and told the cop he would have to call for his partner to find his ID.
@partyof5 , I don’t really “like” you post, but I don’t know what else to do in this context.
As the mother of a son, who is also an only child, I can unfortunately imagine the fear black parents must feel.
I don’t know how you maintain your sanity, honestly.
So some people suffer from failure of imagination, when they make excuses for these killers, time after time? What is broken in them? For surely something is.
Be Black and kill a white kid:
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/louisiana-officer-sentenced-40-years-shooting-death-6-year-old-n741216
Short of that, I have zero faith in our system. A few years ago, we couldn’t even get a conviction after a sleeping (Black) child was killed by a cop here in Detroit:
(Warning: there are very graphic and disturbing written descriptions of what happened to Aiyana and her family in this link.)
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jan/31/detroit-aiyana-stanley-jones-police-officer-cleared
Absent body cam footage, it’s often impossible for anyone to be sure of exactly what transpired in these situations.
Few situations in which people are killed come with body cam footage, but many non-police-officer defendants are convicted, often with much less evidence than in the police officer-related slayings.
If you aren’t a police officer, you don’t get to pull people over. Police officers by the nature of their job are in situations civilians would never find themselves in. Police officers have legal authorities non-LEOs don’t have. I don’t see the point in comparing civilians and LEOs. The legal standard for LEOs is different than that for everyone else. If you don’t like that, get the law changed.
I live locally and the news played the officer’s audio recording. It is thought that this recording was the key in moving the jurors to find him not guilty. The officer asked to see his ID and the victim then replied that he had a legally authorized gun with him. Then as the victim was moving his hands toward the pocket area of his pants (officer testified moving toward pocket area, gf said toward back pocket), the officer kept yelling “don’t pull it out, don’t pull it out”. and then he shot him. He was later found to have a loaded gun in his front pocket.
My heart goes out to the family and friends of Mr. Castille.
I’d say the system was broken… except that I now believe it works just fine: for white people with money. For people of color, it’s the same old travesty it’s always been…
This is an extreme example of cherry picking the data. Over the course of a decade, just nine black officers were charged with a fatal shooting in the line of duty. Of the 11 officers convicted over a decade at least 9 were white. I couldn’t determine the race of the other two officers. So over a decade, you had 9 black officers charged in a fatal police shooting and at most 2 convicted in a trial. Black officers don’t appear to be more likely to be either charged or convicted in a trial in fatal shootings than white officers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/police-shootings/
I think that’s only part of the story. The police dispatcher recording reveals that Officer Yanez initially pulled Castile over because he thought Castile “looked like” a suspect in a robbery that occurred four days earlier, because Castile had a “wide-set nose.” The racial coding there is none too subtle. Castile’s skin color (black) matched, and he had a broad nose, a feature common to many African-Americans. But in the officer’s mind, that already made Castile a potential felon. Castile, who has never been connected to that or any other robbery, complied with the stop, as he had on a number of previous occasions when he had been pulled over by police officers in predominantly white suburbs, essentially for “driving while black.” Yanez and his partner approached the vehicle, Yanez on the driver’s side, and Yanez asked Castile to produce his ID. Castile attempted to comply by reaching for his wallet, while at the same time politely informing the officer that he had a firearm (which he was legally licensed to carry, though he did not initially say that). At that point Yanez yelled, “Don’t reach for it!” and as Castile’s hand continued to move toward his pocket, Yanez fired seven shots, five of which struck and ultimately killed Castile, whose dying words were, “I wasn’t reaching for it.” Castile’s girlfriend, sitting in the front passenger seat,testified that Castile was reaching for his back pocket where he had his wallet containing both his ID (which the officer had just demanded he produce), and his firearm permit. Yanez told the jury that Castile had “pulled out a gun” and that he shot only after he saw the gun, but that testimony is inconsistent both with the testimony of other officers who arrived on the scene shortly after the shooting who said they found the gun buried deep in Castile’s front pants pocket, and with the live Facebook video recorded by Castile’s girlfriend in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, in which no gun is visible.
I don’t think Yanez was motivated by conscious racial animus. I think he was just a scared young cop who panicked and overreacted when he found himself face to face with a black man with a gun–a black man he had already identified as a possible felon (though he wasn’t) and who, with the added element of a gun, he immediately assumed was an immediate threat (though the objective evidence doesn’t support that conclusion). But I do think race played a major role here, first in the racial profiling that led Yanez to stop Castile in the first place. If you’re looking for a robbery suspect with black skin and a wide-set nose and Castile is the first one you’ve seen all day who matches that description, you might very well think he might be the criminal—even though, if you stop to think about it, a black skin and a wide-set nose is going to describe an awfully high percentage of all the black men in America. And second, because I just don’t believe Officer Yanez would have reacted with as much panic if the motorist he had pulled over was a white man who politely informed him that he had a firearm. To many people, a white man with a gun is just a citizen exercising his Second Amendment constitutional rights, while a black man with a gun is a likely criminal and an imminent threat to public safety, not to mention the safety of the police officer who confronts him. But that wasn’t Philando Castile, who by the accounts of all who knew him was a kind and gentle man, much beloved by the schoolchildren at the Saint Paul public school where he worked, who knew him as “Mr. Phil” and are still in deep mourning over his death, and in shock, anger, and disbelief that the man who killed him just walked free.
I think what swayed the predominantly white jury was that they identified more strongly with the officer’s fear than with the tragic consequences for the victim and those who loved him.
It’s small consolation, but the St. Anthony police department where Yanez was employed has decided they no longer want his services as a police officer. I think the interest of public safety is best served by that outcome.
I saw an interview with Philando’s mother today. One fact that came out during the trial was that Philando’s gun was not “fire ready”, meaning it was either unloaded or had the safety on or something else.
Also, unbelievably, the prosecution did NOT show the Facebook live video at all. Even though it starts after the shooting, it is quite clear that the police officer is highly agitated and ready to keep shooting. He seems deranged. Why wouldn’t they show that video?
The jury had 10 white people and 2 black people, both male. Both those men were young and one was an 18 year-old immigrant from Ethiopia. Not exactly a jury that would have had personal experience with racial profiling and unjust treatment by the police. Philando had been pulled over something like 100 times before - not sure where I had heard that.
His mother thinks the prosecution was reluctant to really put away the policeman and so they didn’t build a strong enough case. The defense went on and on about the smell of marijuana in the car (none was found) and how it made the policeman think they were criminals. Ridiculous.
While cherry picking data is a Romani specialty, many people blindly accept the notion that black people get shot at a higher rate during police interactions. The one careful study of this so far, by Roland Fryer, does not confirm this hypothesis.