美国国家公共电台 NPR Fact Check: Are Prosecutors Too Quick To Let The Police Off?

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

In Louisiana, the next move belongs to state prosecutors 2. They decide whether to file charges in a high-profile police shooting. Federal prosecutors say they will not act against two police officers who shot Alton Sterling 3. The shooting came last year amid heightened attention toward many police shootings, and NPR's Martin Kaste has been asking if that attention over the last few years has made police any more likely to be prosecuted 4.

MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE 5: Phil Stinson is a former cop who now studies cops. He's an associate professor at Bowling 6 Green State University where he does something that the government doesn't. He counts the number of times that police officers face criminal charges, state or federal. And sure enough, he says that number jumped in the year right after Ferguson.

PHIL STINSON: In 2015, there were 18 police officers across the country charged with murder or manslaughter resulting from an on-duty shooting where the officer shot and killed someone - 18. And that was the highest we've seen as long as I've been tracking this the last 13 years.

KASTE: But did that increase represent a real change in the way prosecutors look at police shooting cases? Stinson doesn't think so. For one thing, he says the next year, 2016, that number dropped again.

STINSON: Well, if anything, it was regression to the mean. I think we're going back to right what we've seen year to year over the last decade or so. It's just a rare event that an officer gets charged.

KASTE: These numbers are very small, so statistically 7 speaking, the variations don't mean that much. But Stinson says it is important to look at the bigger picture, the fact that American police kill about 1,000 people a year and only about 1 percent of those deaths result in criminal charges. Jim Pasco, with the National Fraternal Order of Police says, there's no reason to frame that low percentage as a bad thing.

JIM PASCO: He can't discard the possibility, however much it may disappoint him, that the reason there are only 18 prosecutions 9 is that there were only grounds for prosecution 8 of 18 cases.

KASTE: That said, Pasco agrees that post-Ferguson activism has not led to a big increase in prosecutions of police.

PASCO: The scrutiny 10 by media and the ubiquity of social media certainly have added to the drumbeat of criticism of police officers. But generally speaking, I don't believe that's translated into a higher number of prosecutions because at the end of the day, prosecutors need provable cases.

KASTE: And that seems to be why the Justice Department refrained from filing charges in Baton 11 Rouge 12. In order to make a federal case, acting 13 U.S. Attorney Corey Amundson would have had to have shown that the police willfully deprived Alton Sterling of his civil rights - in other words, that they'd meant to kill him.

COREY AMUNDSON: Based on the evidence of this particular case, we have all concluded, every single agent and prosecutor 1 on this case, that there simply is not sufficient evidence to proceed with a federal charge.

KASTE: But Amundson also prefaced his remarks yesterday by pointing out that he and all his colleagues on this case are career public servants who've worked for the Justice Department for years. The implication was clear. In this era of President Trump 14 and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, both of whom have repeatedly expressed their support for police, Amundson did not want this prosecutorial 15 decision to be seen as political. Martin Kaste, NPR News.