WPMI
The family of Jawan Dallas speaks after viewing body cam video of the night the 36-year-old died in police custody.
Two days before Independence Day, two Mobile, Alabama, police officers went to a mobile home park after receiving a report of a suspected burglary. Al.com reported that officers confronted Jawan Dallas, who was sitting in a vehicle. After exiting his car, Dallas replied that he had done nothing wrong and tried to run away. Police caught and wrestled with him, and then tased him. When Dallas arrived at the hospital, doctors pronounced him dead.
On the day before Thanksgiving, after months of requests, including pleas at city council meetings, Mobile Police Department officials finally allowed Dallas’s family members to view the officers’ body camera videos. Harry Daniels, Dallas’s family lawyer, claimed that Dallas struggled during the scuffle and said, “I can’t breathe, I don’t want to be George Floyd.” Of all the grim and gut-churning videos of Black people being killed by police, the civil rights attorney said that the 36-year-old man’s beating was one of the worst he’d ever seen.
A grand jury investigated the case and declined to charge the two police officers. Their names have not been released and they have returned to their jobs. Of the four Black people—one young man and three adult men—who have been shot or tased by Mobile police this year, three of them, including Dallas, have died.
“Mobile, we have a problem,” said Robert Clopton, president of the NAACP’s Mobile chapter.
Despite a national uprising and worldwide protests, incrementalism is the defining feature of post–George Floyd policing reforms. Overall, more white civilians die in police shootings than people of color, according to University of Michigan researchers in a January 2023 Center for Racial Justice white paper on use of excessive force by police. The stakes are high for African Americans, particularly in encounters with white officers, as the paper makes clear. They are more likely to be stopped, experience harsher tactics, and die in those interactions.
The United States has the largest number of civilians killed by police of any of the world’s democracies: More than 1,000 people die that way every year. Mapping Police Violence data compiled to date in 2023 tracks with that statistic: 1,082 people have been killed by police this year, and more than 4,200 people have been killed in confrontations with police since George Floyd died. In Canada, which has the second-highest number of people killed by police, the actual tally is in the low double digits.
The George Floyd protests forced local leaders and police departments to re-evaluate budgets and shift some funds to social programs. These initial strategies, however, did not take root. Some cities cut police budgets because pandemic exigencies forced cutbacks. Cities including Los Angeles and New York reallocated police funds to more socially necessary purposes, but then turned around and pumped some COVID relief dollars into their police departments.
At the federal level, Republican infighting and hostility to minimal police reforms has guaranteed legislative stasis. House Democrats introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act in 2020, and again in 2021, only to see it collapse in the Senate. That left President Biden to do what he could with the shards of the act, issuing an executive order that bans chokeholds, curbs no-knock warrants, and provides de-escalation training. The order imposes new data collection mandates on police use of force and misconduct, as well as commendations and other requirements. But since the executive order only pertains to federal agencies, it leaves state and local agencies, where most of these police excesses occur, free to adopt similar policies or avoid them with impunity. (Although the George Floyd bill was reintroduced this year, it has no path to passage.)
At the federal level, Republican infighting and hostility to minimal police reforms has guaranteed legislative stasis.
The “Black people are dangerous” trope is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. Police forces evolved from slave patrols created by the planter classes to keep the enslaved people docile, fearful, and compliant. That those attitudes still suffuse police encounters is no surprise. In May, after a 15-day United Nations tour of six U.S. cities (Minneapolis, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Washington), one official shared that what they had seen and heard reflected “the ‘deep intrinsic legacy’ of slavery and legalized discrimination.”
“Even when a person doesn’t have a weapon, it’s perceived that they pose an actual, physical bodily threat to police officers and others,” Rashawn Ray, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, College Park, told the Virginia Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights in 2021, one year after Floyd’s death.
How would stronger policies dealing with excessive force affect police conduct measures? Since the wider universe of legal stratagems, such as limits on or abolition of qualified immunity, must wind their way through the courts and state legislatures, getting to yes on reforms will have to come from forward-looking departments and localities. The University of Michigan researchers found that police departments that prohibit the use of both chokeholds and strangleholds have 22 percent fewer police killings per capita than departments that lack these policies. It is “unclear,” the researchers concluded, whether the policies themselves produced these results; they surmised that police departments using these policies may be less inclined generally to use force. Similarly, departments that eschew no-knock warrants have lower rates of killings.
Studies of de-escalation strategies, such as remaining calm and avoiding abusive language, have rendered both positive and mixed findings. Again, police departments that are open to these types of trainings may have characteristics that produce fewer fatal encounters.
Beginning in the late 1990s, implicit bias trainings designed to address the unconscious social engineering that feeds into stereotypes and prejudices gained popularity in business and academic settings and were adopted by many police departments. However, Washington University in St. Louis and University of Virginia researchers looked at two implicit bias programs: one, a daylong program involving nearly 4,000 police officers conducted before the pandemic, and the other an online program conducted during the pandemic. They discovered that while both programs helped participants recognize their own “subtle or implicit” biases, those benefits did not carry over to the longer-term strategies to change behaviors—findings that were consistent with those from corporate and academic settings. Similarly, after trainings that began in 2018 for 36,000 New York City police officers, a study found that after the sessions, 42 percent of officers surveyed had not used the strategies.
The simplest truth about this dismal chapter in American history is one that opponents of stronger gun control policies and police reform willfully ignore. Given the proliferation of guns, that some American police officers behave the way they do partly due to training—the assumption that everyone carries a gun—and partly due to fear, any encounter could turn deadly on a dime. Instead of confronting the easy access to firearms, Republicans in Congress and statehouses appear determined to loosen gun laws further, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which knocked down licensing mandates for open carrying of firearms.
Meanwhile, the killings and beatings by local Alabama police continue. On the night of September 29 in Decatur, Alabama, a tow truck driver came to repossess Stephen Perkins’s car. Perkins, an African American, made threats and the driver left, according to police. The driver then returned with officers, who ended up firing 18 shots at Perkins. He died later in the hospital. The police contend he pointed a gun at them. The city, which has faced protests, has not yet disciplined the officers. On November 13, Mobile police killed a 16-year-old Black youth in a predawn raid while searching for another relative.
On December 4, in Pickens County, Alabama, on the western border with Mississippi, a white officer with the town of Reform Police Department stopped a Black man in a car. The video shows the officer leading the handcuffed man to another car. She forces him to lie on the hood. After he tells her that there is a gun in his pocket, she removes it, and fires her stun gun. As he cries, she said, “Do you want it again?” On December 3, police from a number of departments confronted Tyler Goodson, a white man who appeared on the podcast S-Town, at a home in Woodstock. According to news reports, police shot him after he produced a gun.
On Tuesday, the Mobile City Council debated two new ordinances. One would ban no-knock and predawn warrants. The other would detail the conditions for making body camera footage public.
