(Bloomberg) — Black female prosecutors have an outsized impact on whether police officers are charged after deadly shootings despite holding only 1% of elected prosecutor roles nationwide, data by Mapping Police Violence show.
While fewer than 3% of killings by police annually result in a police officer being charged with a crime, Black female prosecutors comprised 9% of the prosecutors who charged officers with a killing between 2013 and 2021. One in five prosecutors who pursued multiple cases of police killings were Black women in that time.
“I think that suggests who the prosecutor is actually does matter to your likelihood of seeing accountability in some of these cases,” said Samuel Sinyangwe, the founder of Mapping Police Violence.
The report compiled information on 1,134 killings by police in the U.S. in 2021 from databases, media reports, obituaries and public records. It was the second most deadly year on record for police killings since 2013, the earliest date for which the group has data. While Black people comprise only 13% of the U.S. population, 28% of people killed by police in 2021 were Black. They were also more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be reported as threatening than their non-Black counterparts.
To be sure, 2021 also saw the conviction and sentencing of Derek Chauvin, the White police officer who received 22 ½ years in prison for murdering George Floyd, a Black man. Still, 97% of killings by police in 2021 were shootings, and only 1% of all deaths last year have resulted in an officer being charged.
The fact that the data remain consistent over past years is cause for alarm, Sinyangwe said.
“That speaks to the urgency that we need interventions, that we need change, and that many of the things that have been proposed sort of rhetorically, don’t seem to be working,” he said.
This is the first year that Mapping Police Violence also looked at the efficacy of policing alternative initiatives, like mental health intervention programs such as CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon, and the STAR program in Denver, Colorado. Early data for a pilot program in New York City show that 95% of people who were visited by mental health professionals accepted care, compared to 82% of people in need who were met by police.
“I think that there’s a lot of work yet to be done, to really hone in on the places that have seen progress being made, to unpack what factors actually led to those outcomes changing, so that more cities and other jurisdictions can emulate that,” Sinyangwe said.
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