Another week goes by and another death at the hands of police results in acquittal of officers, a failure of accountability that once again should make clear that our system of justice fails far too many men and women of color.
On Tuesday, a state grand jury in Rochester, N.Y., refused to hand down charges against police officers involved in the death of Daniel Prude, whom The Washington Post described as “a Black man pinned to the ground last year while handcuffed, hooded and in the throes of a mental health crisis.”
Prude was killed in March, two months before George Floyd was murdered in Minneapolis and two weeks after Breonna Taylor was killed by Louisville police. A video of Prude’s March 23 arrest — he died a couple days later — did not become public until Sept. 4. The video, the Associated Press said, “was initially withheld by police in part because of concerns it would inflame street demonstrations occurring nationwide over George Floyd’s death.”
The video, using the AP’s description,
showed officers placing a mesh bag over Prude’s head to stop him from spitting after they detained him for running naked through the streets. Prude had been evaluated at a hospital for odd behavior a day earlier, but he wasn’t admitted. His family called police because they were concerned about Prude’s safety after he bolted from the house.
One officer pushed Prude’s face against the ground, while another officer pressed a knee to his back. The officers held him down for about two minutes until he fell unconscious. He was taken off life support a week later.
The video would appear to demonstrate, at a minimum, that the officers were complicit in Prude’s death, that their actions contributed in significant ways. As the Post reports, however,
experts found no evidence of trauma from a blocking of Prude’s windpipe or a blood vessel, according to a detailed report released Tuesday by James’s office. One concluded that PCP in Prude’s system made him vulnerable to cardiac arrest, which cut off oxygen to his brain. Another expert assessed officers’ pinning techniques as reasonable.
This — along with both the legal and social presumption that police act in good faith, that they should be given broad leeway in their actions in high-stress situations — was enough to create doubt, and to keep the grand jury from handing down an indictment.
We’ve seen this before — in the failure to indict the officers who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson, Eric Garner in New York, and again and again and again. And each time, we get lost in the individual incidents. We fail to see the broad patterns in play, the permission society gives to police when they deal with racial minorities and the poor, and that cross geographical borders.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, who announced the no-bill on Tuesday, refused to shy away from the connections or to see the grand jury’s decision as a singular action. The failure to indict was part of a larger system, she said (according to the AP), that “frustrated efforts to hold law enforcement officers accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans.”
“What binds these cases is a tragic loss of life in circumstances in which the death could have been avoided,” said James, who, like the mayor of Rochester and the city’s current and former police chiefs, is Black.
“One recognizes the influences of race, from the slave codes to Jim Crow, to lynching, to the war on crime, to the overincarceration of people of color: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. And now Daniel Prude,” she said.
Perhaps this was the correct decision. Perhaps, as the decision implies, Prude is the one at fault. Or perhaps, as James says, this is part of a larger failure to hold our institutions accountable.
(I have a much longer take on this same subject coming soon.)