Police Have Killed 18 Rhode Islanders Since 2000
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Police have killed 18 Rhode Islanders between 2000 and 2014, more than the total number of homicides in Providence last year, according to data compiled by a national independent watchdog site.
The data includes all killings by local and state law enforcement in Rhode Island. That means that both justifiable as well as any incidents that might be found to be unjustified. So far, however, none of the incidents have resulted in an indictment of the officers involved.
At least nine of the incidents have been formally declared justifiable or excusable. Data was not readily available for the others at the time the database was compiled and published on the site, FatalEncounters.org. The overwhelming majority of deaths were shootings. Just two were not. One was by asphyxiation when a mentally ill man was pinned down by police in Portsmouth. The other occurred when a man collapsed and died after being hit with a stun gun.
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Government does not track all police killings
There is no official state or federal government database of all police killings. The FBI does track police killings, but only those that are deemed to have been justified.
But since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri—and in the wake of the recent grand jury decision in the chokehold-death of Eric Garner in New York City—the frequency of police killings has garnered public attention, as have the small gaggle of watchdog sites dedicated to tracking information that public authorities won’t.
“It’s an enormous lapse and a very striking one,” Brown said.
The publisher of FatalEncounters.org said he decided to launch the site in 2012 after driving home and witnessing the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting. The publisher, D. Brian Burghart, decided to find out how often such incidents happened, but when he tried to search the Uniform Crime Reports—the usual go-to FBI resource for such questions, he came up empty-handed.
“I felt like somebody had to collect the real data because without the real numbers law enforcement and society can’t determine which are the policies that result in best outcomes, assuming a best outcome being a living officer and a living person. The FBI was collecting haphazardly, something like 4 percent of agencies were voluntarily reporting, but the media was using the FBI’s numbers as though they were statistically significant or real. Somebody had to disabuse this country of the notion that only 400 people a year were being killed by police,” said Burghart, a Reno, Nevada-based newspaper publisher and journalism instructor at a local university.
His tally, over a 15-year period: approximately 3,090 incidents of officer-involved fatalities.
Without official data, however, Brown said it’s difficult to make definitive comparisons of the rate of officer-involved killings in Rhode Island to other states. “It’s hard to generalize whether Rhode Island is doing better or worse,” Brown said. But, he added, that we know enough to know it’s an issue that merits further public scrutiny and attention from authorities. “Every state needs to be looking at this issue.”
Burghart’s database does give some sense of how Rhode Island measures up against comparable states. In New Hampshire, for example, there were 19 police killings during the same period. Vermont had 16 and Delaware had 9.
Mental health concerns raised
Three of the 18 killings in Rhode Island were of individuals who had symptoms or a history of mental illness. Two of the incidents occurred two years in a row; the last was in 2012.
In February 2012, the mother of a man with a history of mental illness called Portsmouth police to her home, where her son, 25-year-old Craig Raposa, became “resistant and uncooperative,” according to the FatalEncounters.org synopsis of the event. Raposa was not arrested or suspected of committing any crime. “Although not arrested or accused of any crime, Raposa was restrained, cuffed and placed face-down on the parking lot asphalt for an extended period. He died of cardiac asphyxia,” the site states.
The two other incidents also began with calls from distraught mothers to local law enforcement.
In North Kingstown, the mother of a friend of a mentally ill man alerted police to concerns she had over his emotional state. The man charged police with a knife and was shot nine times, leaving him partially blinded and paralyzed. He succumbed to his injuries four years after the incident, according to records posed on FatalEncounters.org.
The year before that shooting, Pawtucket police had fatally shot a man after his mother had called authorities to assist her in bringing him to the hospital. Both the Pawtucket and the North Kingstown shootings led to lawsuits that ended in expensive seven-figure settlements with the families of both men.
“I’ve been very surprised by the numbers of mentally ill people who are killed by police. If you include drug addiction as a mental illness, as the psychology community does, probably 30 percent of the people killed by police are mentally ill or mentally challenged in some way,” Burghart said.
Brown said that spate of incidents prompted the Rhode Island ACLU, along with a number of other mental health advocacy organizations, to push for improved training to help police officers avoid unintentionally escalating confrontations with mentally ill individuals and using unnecessary deadly force in those incidents.
“Some of that has occurred since then,” Brown said.
Race factor continues to haunt
The first Rhode Island case listed in the Fatal Encounters database is its most well-known: the fatal shooting of Cornel Young, Jr., an off-duty Providence police officer who was killed when he came to the assistance of fellow officers who were responding to a fight outside a restaurant where he had been dining. Young was ordered to drop his gun. He didn’t and the two officers fired.
The case touched off a firestorm over racial bias in policing: Young was black; the two officers who shot him were white.
More than a decade later, James Vincent, the president of the Providence branch of the NAACP, worries that little has changed. “I think there is still far too many incidents of racial profiling … in Rhode Island since that happened,” Vincent said.
Thought Vincent is not aware of any subsequent police killings in Rhode Island where race has been deemed a factor, he worries that it could happen again—especially in the wake of the Garner case. Vincent recounted his personal shock over the decision, noting that there were four officers involved, that Garner was already pinned down, and that he said he couldn’t breathe 11 times before he finally succumbed—and it was all caught on video.
“And yet a grand jury couldn’t indict,” Vincent said.
“That has a chilling effect across the country,” Vincent said.
He worries that it might embolden law enforcement in the use of unnecessary deadly force. But Vincent is also hopeful that years from now the Garner case might be looked back as a turning point in reform.
In Rhode Island, Vincent expressed confidence in three of the state’s most prominent law enforcement officers: State Police Col. Steven O’Donnell, Providence Public Safety Commissioner Steven Pare, and Providence Police Chief Hugh Clements. He also said the majority of local police are committed to their jobs of serving and protecting the public.
It’s the “bad apples” in local police agencies that trouble Vincent. He is calling for a reform of the complaint and disciplinary process which, in its current form, makes it difficult to reprimand and punish officers for misconduct. “It’s the police’s inability to police the police,” Vincent said.
Beyond the disciplinary process, Vincent is calling for a wide range of reforms that include: better training, more diversity among local police forces, and an emphasis on alternatives to the deadly use of force. He also thinks there should be statewide, even national, guidelines on the proper use of deadly force, rather than the hodgepodge of department-by-department rules that is in place now.
Former police chief cautions against ‘generalizations’
Joseph Moran, the former police chief in Central Falls, cautions against trying to make generalizations based upon the available data. He said no two circumstances are the same and that even something like the weather could affect the outcome of the split-second decisions officers must make. (His example: officers chasing a robbery suspect during a rainstorm. The suspect pulls out what appears to be a gun but later turns out to be a BB gun. “How do you see it at that distance?” Moran said.)
During his tenure in Central Falls, two of his officers were involved in the fatal shooting of a man who had allegedly been threatening them with a knife.
“It’s not something that any police officer wants to do,” Moran said. “You’re going out there, preserving life and property and protecting individuals on a daily basis.”
Officers who are involved in fatal shootings, he said, often undergo mental health counseling and peer support as they struggle to deal with the effects the incident has had on them. Many end up retiring, said Moran, who is also a former president of the Rhode Island Police Chiefs Association.
“It’s a tragic incident all around,” he said.
While groups like the ACLU press for greater transparency, Moran urges the need for the public to withhold judgment until an investigation has been completed, all the facts have been collected, and a decision has been rendered. In Rhode Island he said common protocol dictates that three agencies investigate fatal shooting by local police: the local department, the State Police, and the Attorney General’s office.
Often, he said, law enforcement cannot release the information the public demands while those investigations are ongoing. Police, he noted, owe due process to those they investigate. “That’s lacking for police officers in deadly force incidents,” he said, referring to the tendency of some in the public to draw premature conclusions about what really happened.
In the case of the incident in Central Falls, the two officers involved were cleared. Moran said he remains “very comfortable” with what happened. He also expressed confidence in the grand jury system, which relies on “peers” to weigh the results of an investigation and decide whether to indict.
But others say public confidence in the justice, especially among racial minorities has been shaken to its core in recent months. “We’re in a crisis—a national crisis,” Vincent said. “The judicial system is on trial.”
Related Slideshow: Top RI Fatal Police Incidents - See the Cases
The below slides list all 18 deadly incidents involving a police officer in Rhode Island between 2000 and 2013. Details and incident descriptions were collected from a national watchdog database of such incidents, FatalEncounters.org. For a number of incidents, official decisions regarding the justifiability of the officer’s actions were not available from the database.
Note that all known police killings, including those that were officially declared justifiable, are listed. So far, no recent incidents in Rhode Island have been deemed as unjustifiable or inexcusable, according to the database.
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