Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns

Fatal Police Shootings Of Unarmed Black People Reveal Troubling Patterns Enlarge this image toggle caption Joe Raedle/Getty Images Joe Raedle/Getty Images Ronell Foster was riding his bicycle through the hushed streets of Vallejo, Calif., one evening when a police officer noticed that the bike had no lights and that he was weaving in and out of traffic. "Many officers will go their entire career without shooting — sometimes without pulling their gun out at all," said Peter Scharf, a criminologist and professor in the School of Public Health at Louisiana State University and co-author of The Badge and the Bullet: Police Use of Deadly Force. Ronald C. Machen Jr., the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia for more than five years during the Obama administration, said that prosecuting police officers who gun down unarmed Black men and women will continue to be challenging until there are more "minorities in the system." "Unions have got to understand that they can't continue to have people over and over again who are doing these things continue to be police officers," said McKinnon, the former chief. "The hiring of Zechariah Presley probably would not have taken place in my administration given the information I have," said Kingsland Police Chief Robert Jones, who took over the department in 2019.