Out of more than 160,000 “most serious” cases prosecuted at the federal level in 2010 (the latest year for which data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics), only 11 failed to return indictments.
In other words, only .007 percent of cases taken to grand juries come back without an indictment. On the Monday before Thanksgiving, the grand jury hearing the case in which Officer Darren Wilson fatally shot unarmed black teen Michael Brown six times became part of that .007 percent .
In all fairness, that .007 percent is of all federal cases (this was a state grand jury) and represents all major cases. Comparing apples to apples and police shootings of unarmed civilians to police shootings of unarmed civilians, the outcome of the Wilson grand jury makes much more sense.
Looking at St. Louis, of which Ferguson (where the Michael Brown shooting took place) is a suburb, four separate investigations into police shootings have been taken to a grand jury in the past 20 years. None of them came back with indictments . These numbers are similar in other cities; Dallas, for example, sent 81 officer involved shootings (not all of them fatal) to grand juries between 2008 and 2012. Only one of the 175 officers involved was indicted .
Legally speaking, the Wilson grand jury came back with the right decision because the law is set up to protect police in their decisions for or against lethal force. The legal safeguards that go into effect during the investigations of police shootings were set up to shelter officers in making the split-second lifesaving (and life-taking) decisions when confronted with armed and dangerous criminals.
This shield from guilt was originally created by the Supreme Court in the 1980s after the War on Drugs (which started in the '70s) put the police in an adversarial position with the people they were supposed to be protecting, causing police fatality rates to spike to their highest levels since the end of alcohol prohibition.
With next-to-no accountability for their actions, it’s little wonder that we’ve seen police across the country revert to a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality. The day before Wilson’s grand jury came back with no indictment, an officer shot a 12-year-old boy with a toy gun less than two seconds after he pulled up, before his partner could even open the door to his cruiser .
At least four other unarmed men (all of them black) were killed by police in the month before Michael Brown’s death : Eric Garner was strangled to death by an officer for selling untaxed cigarettes, John Crawford was shot for allegedly waving around a BB gun he had picked up in the BB gun section of Walmart, Ezell Ford was shot in the back while lying on the ground during a police search, and Dante Parker was tased to death for riding a bicycle in the vicinity of a robbery where the perpetrator fled on a bicycle.
Since the system was restructured to protect police officers from blame in the 1980s, crime rates have fallen dramatically, and police deaths have fallen accordingly. The system created in the crime-ridden 1980s no longer makes sense in 2014, when police are safer than they have been since the industrial revolution.
Until changes are made, the price of broad use of deadly force policies by police departments will continue to be paid by the blood of innocent civilians, a disproportionate number of which will be minorities.