Key findings from AP's investigation into police force that isn't supposed to be lethal

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Key findings from AP's investigation into police force that isn't supposed to be lethal

2024-03-29 11:34 Last Updated At：11:40

Every day, police in the U.S. rely on common use-of-force tactics that, unlike guns, are meant to stop people without killing them. But when misused, these tactics can still end in death.

Over a decade, more than 1,000 people died after police subdued them through physical holds, stun guns, body blows and other means not intended to be lethal, an investigation led by The Associated Press found. In hundreds of cases, officers weren’t taught or didn’t follow best safety practices for this force, creating a recipe for death.

Medical officials cited law enforcement as causing or contributing to about half of the deaths. In many others, significant police force went unmentioned and drugs or preexisting health problems were blamed instead.

These cases included George Floyd, whose 2020 death under the body weight of an officer sparked a national reckoning over policing. And while Floyd’s encounter happened to be caught on video, capturing his last words of “I can’t breathe,” many others throughout the United States have escaped notice.

Here are takeaways from the AP’s investigation done in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs at the University of Maryland and Arizona State University, and FRONTLINE (PBS):

The deadly encounters happened just about everywhere, according to an analysis of a database AP created. Big cities, suburbs and rural America. Red states and blue states. Restaurants, assisted-living centers and, most commonly, in or near the homes of those who died.

The deceased came from all walks of life — a poet, a nurse, a saxophone player in a mariachi band, a truck driver, a sales director, a rodeo clown and even a few off-duty law enforcement officers. All but 3% of the dead were men. Most tended to be in their 30s and 40s. The youngest was just 15, the oldest 95.

The toll, however, disproportionately fell on Black Americans. They made up a third of those who died despite representing only 12% of the U.S. population. Others feeling the brunt were those impaired by a medical, mental health or drug emergency, a group particularly susceptible to force even when lightly applied.

If incidents turn chaotic and officers make split-second decisions to use force, “people do die,” said Peter Moskos, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and former Baltimore police officer. “The only way to get down to zero is to get rid of policing,” he added, “and that’s not going to save lives either.”

When the force came, it could be sudden and extreme. Other times, the force was minimal, and yet the people nevertheless died, sometimes from a drug overdose or a combination of factors.

In about 30% of the cases, police were intervening to stop people who were injuring others or who posed a threat of danger. But roughly 25% of those who died were threatening no one or, at most, committing minor infractions, AP’s review of cases shows. The rest involved other non-violent situations with people who police said were trying to resist arrest or flee.

What led up to the force was sometimes unclear. In more than 100 cases, police either withheld key details or witnesses disputed the officer’s account — and body-camera footage didn’t exist to help add clarity.

In hundreds of cases, officers repeated errors that experts and trainers have spent years trying to eliminate. Perhaps the best example is how officers were warned that holding someone facedown in what is known as prone restraint is dangerous.

Many policing experts agree that someone can stop breathing if pinned on their chest for too long or with too much weight, and the Department of Justice has issued warnings to that effect since 1995.

Reporters identified dozens and dozens of cases in which officers disregarded people who told them they were struggling for air or even about to die, often uttering the words, “I can’t breathe.” But with no standard national rules, what police are taught about the risks of prone restraint is often left to the states and individual departments.

Some officers involved in fatalities testified they had been assured that prone position was never deadly, AP found, while many others were trained to roll people onto their sides to aid breathing and simply failed to do so.

Officers were usually cleared by their departments in internal investigations. The AP investigation identified just 28 deaths where officers ended up charged by prosecutors.

The AP and its partners focused on local police, sheriff’s deputies and other officers patrolling the streets or responding to dispatch calls. Reporters filed nearly 7,000 requests for government documents and body-camera footage, receiving more than 700 autopsy reports or death certificates, and uncovering video in at least four dozen cases that has never been published or widely distributed.

Those records led them to identify at least 1,036 deaths after police had used what is known as “less-lethal force” during the decade of 2012 through 2021 — an average of two a week.

The federal government, for its part, has struggled for years and years to count these deaths.

Congress started trying to get the Justice Department to do so in 2000. The department has acknowledged its data is incomplete, blames spotty reporting from police departments, and does not make whatever information exists publicly available.

Mortality data maintained by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also has gaps. The AP found that when a death certificate does not list words such as “police” and “law enforcement,” the CDC’s language-reading software doesn’t label the death as involving “legal intervention.” This means the death data flagged police involvement in, at most, 34% of the deaths the investigation identified.

Because the country has no clear idea how many people die like this and why, meaningful reforms will remain difficult, said Dr. Roger Mitchell Jr., a leader in the push to improve tracking and one of the nation’s few Black chief medical examiners when he held the office in Washington, D.C., from 2014 to 2021.

“Any time anyone dies before their day in court, or dies in an environment where the federal government or the local government’s job is to take care of you,” he said, “it needs transparency. It cannot be in the dark of night.”

This story is part of an ongoing investigation led by The Associated Press in collaboration with the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs and FRONTLINE (PBS). The investigation includes the Lethal Restraint interactive story, database and the documentary, “Documenting Police Use Of Force,” premiering April 30 on PBS.

Contributing to this story were Thalia Beaty, Martha Bellisle, Jacques Billeaud, Michael Catalini, Brett Chambers, Mary Dalrymple, Trenton Daniel, Ryan J. Foley, Kristin M. Hall, Roxana Hegeman, Carla K. Johnson, Angeliki Kastanis, Denise Lavoie, Andy Lemberger, Jeff Martin, Jennifer McDermott, Brian McDonnell, Holbrook Mohr, Aaron Morrison, Sean Mussenden, Serginho Roosblad, John Seewer, Rhonda Shafner, Taylor Stevens, Mitch Weiss and Helen Wieffering.

To view stories by journalists at the Howard Center for Investigative Journalism programs, go here.

The Associated Press receives support from the Public Welfare Foundation for reporting focused on criminal justice. This story also was supported by Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

Anti-war protesters dig in as some schools close encampments after reports of antisemitic activity

2024-04-28 03:23 Last Updated At：03:31

NEW YORK (AP) — As students protesting the Israel-Hamas war at college campuses across U.S. dug in Saturday and vowed to keep their demonstrations going, some universities moved to shut down encampments after reports of antisemitic activity among the protesters.

With the death toll mounting in the war in Gaza, protesters nationwide are demanding that schools cut financial ties to Israel and divest from companies they say are enabling the conflict. Some Jewish students say the protests have veered into antisemitism and made them afraid to set foot on campus.

Early Saturday, police in riot gear cleared an encampment on the campus of Northeastern University in Boston. Massachusetts State Police said about 102 protesters were arrested and will be charged with trespassing and disorderly conduct. Protesters said they were given about 15 minutes to disperse before being arrested.

As workers pulled down tents and bagged up the debris from the encampment, several dozen people across from the encampment chanted, “Let the Kids Go," and slogans against the war in Gaza. They also booed as police cars passed and taunted the officers who stood guard over the encampment.

The school said in a statement that the demonstration, which began two days ago, had become “infiltrated by professional organizers” with no affiliation to the school and antisemitic slurs, including “kill the Jews,” had been used.

“We cannot tolerate this kind of hate on our campus,” the statement posted on the social media platform X said.

The Huskies for a Free Palestine student group disputed the university’s account, saying in a statement that counterprotesters were to blame for the slurs and no student protesters “repeated the disgusting hate speech.”

Students at the protest said a counterprotester attempted to instigate hate speech but insisted their event was peaceful and, like many across the country, was aimed at drawing attention to what the described as the “genocide” in Gaza and their university’s complicity in the war.

The University of Pennsylvania took similar action to Northeastern on Friday, when interim President J. Larry Jameson called for an encampment of protesters on the west Philadelphia campus to be disbanded, saying it violates the university’s facilities policies, though about 40 tents remained in place Saturday morning.

The "harassing and intimidating comments and actions” by some protesters violate the school’s open expression guidelines as well as state and federal law, Jameson said, and vandalism of a statue with antisemitic graffiti was “especially reprehensible and will be investigated as a hate crime.”

A faculty group said Saturday that it was “deeply disturbed” by the university president’s email, saying it included “unsubstantiated allegations” that “have been disputed to us by faculty and students who have attended and observed the demonstration.”

The university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors said Jameson's statement “mischaracterizes the overall nature of an antiwar protest that necessarily involves strong emotions on both sides but has not, to our knowledge, involved any actual violence or threats of violence to individuals on our campus."

Campus protests began after Hamas’ deadly attack on southern Israel, when militants killed about 1,200 people, most of them civilians, and took roughly 250 hostages. During the ensuing war, Israel has killed more than 34,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, according to the local health ministry.

Israel and its supporters have branded the protests as antisemitic, while critics of Israel say it uses such allegations to silence opponents. Although some protesters have been caught on camera making antisemitic remarks or violent threats, organizers of the protests, some of whom are Jewish, say it is a peaceful movement aimed at defending Palestinian rights and protesting the war.

At Columbia University, where protesters have inspired pro-Palestinian demonstrations across the country, students representing the encampment said Friday that they reached an impasse with administrators and intended to continue their protest.

The university’s senate passed a resolution Friday that created a task force to examine the administration’s leadership, which last week called in police in an attempt to clear the protest, resulting in scuffles and more than 100 arrests.

Though the university has repeatedly set and then pushed back deadlines for the removal of the encampment, the school sent an email to students Friday night saying that bringing back police “at this time” would be counterproductive.

Also Friday, Columbia student protester Khymani James walked back comments made in an online video in January that recently received new attention. James said in the video that “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and people should be grateful James wasn’t killing them.

“What I said was wrong,” James said in a statement. “Every member of our community deserves to feel safe without qualification.”

James, who served as a spokesperson for the pro-Palestinian encampment as a member of Columbia University Apartheid Divest, was banned from campus Friday, according to a Columbia spokesperson.

Protest organizers said James’ comments didn’t reflect their values and declined to describe James’ level of involvement with the demonstration.

Decisions to call in law enforcement, leading to hundreds of arrests nationwide, have prompted school faculty members at universities in California, Georgia and Texas to initiate or pass votes of no confidence in their leadership. They are largely symbolic rebukes, without the power to remove their presidents.

But the tensions pile pressure on school officials, who are already scrambling to resolve the protests as May graduation ceremonies near.

The University of Southern California drew criticism after refusing to allow the valedictorian, who has publicly supported Palestinians, to make a commencement speech. Administrators then scrapped the keynote speech by filmmaker Jon M. Chu. The school announced the cancellation of its main graduation event Thursday, a day after more than 90 protesters were arrested by police in riot gear.

USC President Carol Folt made her first public statement late Friday addressing the controversies as “incredibly difficult for all of us.”

“No one wants to have people arrested on their campus. Ever. But, when long-standing safety policies are flagrantly violated, buildings vandalized, Department of Public Safety directives repeatedly ignored, threatening language shouted, people assaulted, and access to critical academic buildings blocked, we must act immediately to protect our community,” Folt said.

Arizona State University said 69 people were arrested early Saturday on suspicion of criminal trespassing for setting up an unauthorized encampment on a lawn on its Tempe campus. The protesters were given chances to leave, and those who refused were arrested.

“While the university will continue to be an environment that embraces freedom of speech, ASU’s first priority is to create a safe and secure environment that supports teaching and learning,” the university said in a statement.

Perry reported from Meredith, New Hampshire. Associated Press journalists in various locations contributed, including Jacques Billeaud, Aaron Morrison, Stefanie Dazio, Kathy McCormack, Jim Vertuno, Acacia Coronado, Sudhin Thanawala, Jeff Amy, Jeff Martin, Mike Stewart, Collin Binkley, Carolyn Thompson, Jake Offenhartz, Jesse Bedayn and Sophia Tareen.