Over the past ten years, 54 policemen have been charged for fatally shooting someone while on duty, according to an analysis by the Washington Post and Bowling Green University. That's almost one every two months. Few of the officers charged and whose cases have been resolved have been convicted.
And those convicted or who pleaded guilty have not been punished very severely - they’ve tended to get little time behind bars, on average four years and sometimes only weeks. This is probably because jurors are very reluctant to punish police officers, tending to view them as guardians of order, according to prosecutors and defense lawyers.
Among the officers charged since 2005 for fatal shootings, more than three-quarters were white. Two-thirds of their victims were minorities, all but two of them black.
Nearly all other cases involved black officers who killed black victims.
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