164164 Chapter 5 | Civil Rights1,147 people in the United States; of those, 149 were unarmed and 49 were African
Americans (see What Do the Facts Say?).^43 Most of these involved tragic circumstances
in which police were acting appropriately given existing protocol. But several highly
publicized cases reveal negligent and, in some cases, criminal behavior by police
officers. In 2013, following the acquittal of a neighborhood watch member, George
Zimmerman, for shooting an unarmed 17-year-old African American, Trayvon Martin,
the group Black Lives Matter was formed.^44 The next year in Ferguson, Missouri,
thousands of protesters gathered to call attention to the killing of an unarmed man,
Michael Brown, by a police officer. The officer was acquitted, but an investigation by
the Department of Justice found patterns of discriminatory behavior by the Ferguson
Police Department. From 2015 to 2018, other high-profile cases of unarmed African
Americans being killed by officers happened in Cleveland, Baltimore, Chicago,
Staten Island, Baton Rouge, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Sacramento. One case in
North Charleston, South Carolina, led to a murder charge for the officer. Following a
daytime traffic stop for a broken taillight, Officer Michael Slager shot Walter Scott in
the back eight times from 15 to 20 feet away as Scott was running away, and lied about
what happened to cover up his crime. A bystander’s video showed the murder and led
to Slager’s arrest. State first-degree murder charges were dismissed, however, as part
of a plea deal. Slager ultimately plead guilty to a federal civil rights charge of using
excessive force and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.^45 Overall, convictions in these
cases are rare. One study found that of the roughly 12,000 police shootings from 2005
to 2017, there were 80 officers arrested for murder or manslaughter and just over one-
third were convicted.^46
African Americans and other minorities are also subjected to hate crimes much
more frequently than whites.^47 According to FBI statistics, in 2016 half of race-related
hate crimes in the United States were “anti-black,” while only 21 percent were “anti-
white” ( 58 percent of all hate crimes are race based). This means that the rate of anti-
black hate crimes is nearly four times what would be expected based on the percentage
of African Americans in the United States, while the rate of anti-white hate crimes is
less than one-third as high as would be expected. One of the most extreme hate crimes
in recent years happened in 2015 when Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist,
shot and killed nine people at a Bible study in the historic Emanuel African MethodistMourners outside the Emanuel
AME Church in Charleston, South
Carolina, pray at the memorial for the
nine people shot and killed by white
supremacist Dylann Roof during a
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