For the second time this year, a jury in Minneapolis has ruled against a former police officer for killing a Black man.
Like the conviction of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, the verdict Thursday against Kimberly Potter on two counts of manslaughter for the shooting death of Daunte Wright during a traffic stop represented an unusual decision to send a police officer to prison.
And yet, despite the two high-profile convictions in Minneapolis, a review of the data a year and a half after America’s summer of protest shows that accountability for officers who kill remains elusive and that the sheer numbers of people killed in encounters with police have remained steady.
Since Floyd’s death in May of last year, 1,646 people have been killed by the police, or about three people per day on average, according to Mapping Police Violence, a nonprofit that tracks people killed by police. Although murder or manslaughter charges against officers have increased this year, criminal charges, much less convictions, remain exceptionally rare.
That underscores both the benefit of the doubt usually accorded law officers who are often making life-or-death decisions in a split second and the way the law and the power of police unions often protect officers, say activists and legal experts.
Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police, said the rarity of criminal charges against officers does not indicate a lack of accountability, but simply reflects that the vast majority of police shootings are lawful — with many occurring under dangerous circumstances in which officers have to make quick, life-or-death decisions.
According to data kept by Philip M. Stinson, a criminal justice professor, and a research team at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, 21 officers this year have been charged with murder or manslaughter for an on-duty shooting — although five of the officers charged are for the same encounter: the killing in November 2020 of a 15-year-old boy who was a suspect in an armed robbery.
While this is an increase from the 16 officers charged in 2020 and the highest number since Stinson began compiling the data since 2005, it remains small next to the roughly 1,100 people killed by police annually. Black people are still 2 1/2 to 3 times as likely as white people to be killed by a police officer, according to Mapping Police Violence.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.