Sign the petition: Ban secret grand juries for police-involved killings.
Earlier this week, a Minnesota county announced that the county attorney office would no longer use grand juries in police-involved killings.
This decision comes after weeks of pressure from protesters demanding that the Hennepin County Attorney directly prosecute the officers who killed Jamar Clark. Minneapolis community activists argued that grand juries are where officer-involved shooting cases go to die. Currently, California is the only state to ban grand jury investigations of police-involved shootings.
Sign the petition: Support independent prosecutors instead of grand juries for officer-involved deaths.
A criminologist at Bowling Green State University found that, over a 7-year period ending in 2011, only 41 officers were charged with murder or manslaughter. In that same time period, police departments reported over 2,600 justifiable homicide. The disparity is likely far greater than we know because departments are not required to report homicides they deemed justifiable.
Grand jury investigations so heavily favor police that even in the face of staggering evidence of misconduct and wrongdoing, officers are almost never charged in civilian deaths. The officer who choked Eric Garner to death on video used an illegal maneuver, banned by the NYPD over 20 years prior. He was still not charged. The police who shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice within seconds of arriving at a Cleveland playground lied about the threat Tamir posed. They were not charged for the shooting death or for their blatantly false report.
Police officers must not be above the laws they are charged to uphold. They must not be allowed to kill with impunity, lie with impunity, and still be given unchecked authority over community members. We cannot live in constant fear because police officers have no limits on the harm they can do.
We must take all officer-involved death cases out of the biased grand jury system. Sign the petition.