Police said they thought he had a gun. It turned out to be a cellphone.
Stephon Clark was standing in the backyard of his grandparents’ house, where he was staying, when police confronted him. Within seconds, officers would open fire, shooting 20 rounds as one of them shouted, “Gun! Gun! Gun!” It would turn out, though, that the black 22-year-old was unarmed — what police said was a firearm was really a cellphone.
The shooting, which happened on March 18 in Sacramento, California, is the latest to draw widespread criticism and protest as the Black Lives Matter movement has put a greater focus on racial disparities in police shootings and the criminal justice system.
According to a press release from the Sacramento Police Department, officers were in the area at night, investigating reports of a man who allegedly broke car windows and hid in a backyard. A helicopter directed the two officers to Clark.
Body camera footage, released on March 21, gives some idea of what happened next, though it’s hard to make out many details because it was dark out. The officers approached Clark as he ran to his backyard. One officer shouted, “Show me your hands! Stop!” Clark continued to move, ending up in the backyard. The officers pursued him. Within seconds, the cop shouted more orders — “Show me your hands!” — and then yelled, “Gun, gun, gun!”
The two officers on the scene then fired 20 shots — never identifying themselves as police before they opened fire. An autopsy commissioned by Clark’s family claimed that he was hit eight times from behind or the side, and he took three to 10 minutes to die.
Warning: graphic footage of a police shooting:
The officers claimed they feared for their safety, believing that Clark was advancing toward them with a firearm. After the shooting, the officers can be heard in the video asking each other if they were hurt.
About six minutes after the shooting, backup arrived, and officers administered aid to Clark, failing to revive him. He was declared dead at the scene.
Around this point, one officer also asked others on the scene to mute their mics — and they proceeded to talk. Sacramento police spokesperson Vance Chandler told the Sacramento Bee, “There are a variety of reasons why officers have the opportunity to mute their body worn cameras.”
The identities of the two officers have not been officially released. They have both been put on paid administrative leave, as is standard policy at the Sacramento Police Department. The California Department of Justice will oversee an investigation into the shooting.
The city implemented reforms in 2016 after the fatal shooting of Joseph Mann, a black man with mental health issues. Among other changes, the reforms require the release of videos within 30 days of a shooting. Local activists are already pushing for more reforms following the shooting, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Meanwhile, protests have continued in Sacramento and elsewhere as Clark’s death has become the latest incident of police use of force to draw nationwide attention since the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 — with critics arguing that it’s yet another example of the vast racial disparities in how police use force.
Based on nationwide data collected by the Guardian, black Americans are more than twice as likely as their white counterparts to be killed by police when accounting for population. In 2016, police killed black Americans at a rate of 6.66 per 1 million people, compared to 2.9 per 1 million for white Americans.
There have also been several high-profile police killings since 2014 involving black suspects. In Baltimore, six police officers were indicted for the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody. In North Charleston, South Carolina, Michael Slager was charged with murder and fired from the police department after shooting Walter Scott, who was fleeing and unarmed at the time. In Ferguson, Darren Wilson killed unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown. In New York City, NYPD officer Daniel Pantaleo killed Eric Garner by putting the unarmed 43-year-old black man in a chokehold.
One possible explanation for the racial disparities: Police tend to patrol high-crime neighborhoods, which are disproportionately black. That means they’re going to be generally more likely to initiate a policing action, from traffic stops to more serious arrests, against a black person who lives in these areas. And all of these policing actions carry a chance, however small, to escalate into a violent confrontation.
That’s not to say that higher crime rates in black communities explain the entire racial disparity in police shootings. A 2015 study by researcher Cody Ross found, “There is no relationship between county-level racial bias in police shootings and crime rates (even race-specific crime rates), meaning that the racial bias observed in police shootings in this data set is not explainable as a response to local-level crime rates.” That suggests something else — such as, potentially, racial bias — is going on.
One reason to believe racial bias is a factor: Studies show that officers are quicker to shoot black suspects in video game simulations. Josh Correll, a University of Colorado Boulder psychology professor who conducted the research, said it’s possible the bias could lead to even more skewed outcomes in the field. “In the very situation in which [officers] most need their training,” he said, “we have some reason to believe that their training will be most likely to fail them.”
Part of the solution to potential bias is better training that helps cops acknowledge and deal with their potential prejudices. But critics also argue that more accountability could help deter future brutality or excessive use of force, since it would make it clear that there are consequences to the misuse and abuse of police powers. Yet right now, lax legal standards make it difficult to legally punish individual police officers for use of force, even when it might be excessive.
Legally, what most matters in police shootings is whether police officers reasonably believed that their lives were in immediate danger, not whether the shooting victim actually posed a threat.
In the 1980s, a pair of Supreme Court decisions — Tennessee v. Garner and Graham v. Connor — set up a framework for determining when deadly force by cops is reasonable.
Constitutionally, “police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,” David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, previously told Dara Lind for Vox. The first circumstance is “to protect their life or the life of another innocent party” — what departments call the “defense-of-life” standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.
The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from a Supreme Court decision called Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, “they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight.”
The key to both of the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer’s “objectively reasonable” belief that there is a threat.
That standard comes from the other Supreme Court case that guides use-of-force decisions: Graham v.
