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officers and discourage elected district
attorneys from pursuing charges. It’s
also difficult for many civilians to see
police as anything but good guys.
“Often times, because you have
enough people in society who have
such a favorable opinion of the police,
you end up in a situation where one
of those people almost always makes
it onto a jury,” Sinyangwe says. Jurors
may also be reluctant to question the
split- second decisions police officers
must make in a dangerous line of work.
More than 1,500 law- enforcement offi-
cers have died on the job in the past de-
cade, and tens of thousands have been
injured, according to the National Law
Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund
and the FBI. In 2018, the FBI says, 55 of-
ficers were attacked and killed on duty,
nine more than in the previous year.
“We are on combat every day,
24 hours a day, seven days a week,
against an enemy we don’t know,” says
Thomas Lake, who was a St. Louis po-
lice sergeant in November 2016 when
he was shot twice in the face while on
patrol. Lake was in his marked police
car at a traffic light when another driver
pulled up next to him and opened fire
without saying a word. “I registered it
lawsuit. But over time, the family says
they felt ostracized for demanding jus-
tice. When Tom Lewis, the Punta Gorda
police chief at the time, faced a misde-
meanor negligence charge as a result
of the shooting, local businesses raised
money for his legal defense. Uniformed
officers packed the courtroom during
his trial, which ended in acquittal after
his attorney argued that Lewis had no
way of knowing Knowlton could be
harmed during the exercise. “You’re not
only the victim, but you’re the bad guy,”
Steve Knowlton says.
Under use-of-force standards set by
U.S. Supreme Court cases in the 1980s,
police officers may be justified in using
lethal force when they have reason to
believe there is a credible and immedi-
ate threat to themselves or others. That
threshold, critics say, makes it hard to
prosecute officers or even challenge
them. “It’s a free get-out-of-jail pass
from the highest court in America,”
says attorney Ben Crump, who has rep-
resented several families in high-profile
cases involving police use of force.
Because there’s no federal require-
ment that officers exhaust all other re-
sources before using lethal force, ad-
vocates for police reform say there’s no
incentive to change their ways. A 2015
Amnesty International USA report said
no state complies with international
law that requires officers to use deadly
force only as a last resort to protect
themselves and others from death or
serious injury. In February, California
legislators introduced a bill that would
have been the first in the nation to
allow officers to use deadly force only
when there is “no reasonable alterna-
tive,” but dozens of police unions op-
posed it, and the final version lost some
of its strongest language. It no longer
requires officers to exhaust all reason-
able alternatives or to first try to de-
escalate confrontations. “They watered
down the bill a lot,” says Crump, add-
ing, “I’m still cautiously optimistic that
it gives us hope for change.”
But the Knowltons are tired of wait-
ing for change. “Our family has to sit
here as it drags on,” says William, 56.
“The way that she got taken away,” he
says before trailing off. “The moment
I’m a happy person is the moment I for-
get what happened to her.” was a gun after he pulled the trigger and
hit me in the face,” Lake says. “My situa-
tion happened in less than a fraction of a
second, and it changed my life forever.”the idea of convictinG an officer
for a mistake made in the heat of the
moment —or while conducting a friendly
exercise —is especially difficult for peo-
ple who see police as their friends. Mary
Knowlton was one such person. Days
before she died, Knowlton told her fam-
ily she wanted to attend the event to
support her local police after a perilous
summer for law enforcement : in 2016,
eight Baton Rouge, La., and Dallas offi-
cers had been murdered amid a string of
fatal police shootings of black men.
The deadly mix-up occurred when
Coel—who stored both live ammo
and blank cartridges in his patrol
car—loaded his weapon with what he
thought were blanks, investigators said,
adding that the cartridges were similar
in shape and size. In the months after
the shooting, Steve, his brother William
and their father assumed law enforce-
ment would hold accountable those re-
sponsible for the mistake. When the city
offered the family a $2 million settle-
ment, they took it instead of filing a civilGwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, speaks to media on Aug. 19 in New York City