Delke Trial: Criminologist Says First-Degree Murder Charge Is Rare For Shootings By Police

If you follow news coverage of police going on trial for killing someone, you’ve probably heard Philip Stinson’s name before.

Courtesy Bowling Green State University

Criminologist Philip Stinson has been tracking crimes committed by police officers since 2005.

Since 2005, he has been tracking every single time an officer is charged with a criminal offense. And he’s got an inside perspective on the topic, as a former cop.

After Officer Andrew Delke was charged with murder in 2019, I called Stinson to talk through how rare it is for an officer to face such a serious charge. Delke is the first Nashville police officer charged with murder for an on-duty shooting — and one of just a few across the country. Jury selection for the trial begins next week.

“Well, it’s difficult to find information in terms of official statistics because there aren’t any,” he said. “The federal government doesn’t maintain any data on crimes committed by nonfederal sworn law enforcement officers.

“So, it’s really, really difficult to get a handle on this. And that’s one of the things that I was looking at. How could I develop a research study that would look at many, many agencies across the country?”

Stinson says he and his researchers set up Google Alerts to see every time news outlets reported on criminal charges brought against an officer.

“We find more than 1,100 cases across the country of officers who are arrested for crimes, anything from very minor crimes — disorderly conduct to drunk driving, things like that — to rape and murder on the other end of the spectrum, and everything in between.”

Stinson says the number of arrests he’s seen reported has stayed pretty stable in all the years he’s been tracking them. If anything, he’s seeing slightly more news reports. And that’s even though about 2,000 newspapers have gone out of business since he started researching police crime.

But most times when a police officer is arrested, it’s for something like drunk driving. Things get murkier when an officer shoots someone.

More: Learn more about the case in our podcast, Deadly Force

“So, the best estimate that I can give you is that between 900 and 1,000 times each year across the United States on duty, police officers shoot and kill someone,” he said. “That’s data from The Washington Post. … What we found is that the official, government numbers from both the Justice Department and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had really been shortchanged.”

Stinson says that even though about 1,000 people are shot and killed by police every single year, the officers involved rarely face criminal charges. That’s because the killings are often considered to be legally justified. In other words, officers pulled the trigger because they were afraid for their lives. Or they were protecting someone else’s safety. And, in those cases, the law is usually on their side.

“It’s only the cases where an officer is found to have not been legally justified that criminal charges are considered,” he said. “And frankly, in some cases they’re still not brought. Some prosecutors say, ‘Well, you know what? We didn’t think we’d get a conviction. So, we didn’t bring the charges.’ ”

According to another database that tracks police violence, Mapping Police Violence, about 1,100 people were killed by police last year. But only 16 officers involved were charged with crimes. That’s a little more than 1%. Stinson says only a small fraction of officers who have shot someone since 2005 have been charged with murder or manslaughter, and even fewer have been found guilty. Plus, he says that even when an officer is convicted, it’s often for a lesser offense.

A Minneapolis jury broke that trend in April when they convicted Officer Derek Chauvin on three murder and manslaughter counts for killing George Floyd last year.

But the overall pattern is the same: It’s incredibly rare for an officer to be criminally charged for killing someone, and even less likely that they’ll be convicted. Stinson, a former officer, says it often comes back to this idea that killings by police are justified.

“What we see when these cases finally get to trial is that even with strong video evidence, it’s very difficult for a prosecutor to get a conviction in one of these cases,” he said. “And that’s because juries and seemingly judges, sitting as the trier of fact in bench trials, are very reluctant to second guess the split-second decisions of police officers in potentially violent street encounters where they may be confronted with a deadly force situation.

“We’ve seen it time and again. So, it’s very difficult to assess these situations.”

Stinson says they don’t let reporters, criminologists and lawyers hang out in the jury deliberation room. So, it’s hard to know exactly how jurors make their decisions. But the verdict is almost always not guilty.

You can learn about the history of shootings by Nashville police that didn’t result in murder charges on episode three of Deadly Force Wednesday night at 6:30 on 90.3 or your WPLN app. You can also follow the podcast by visiting wpln.org/deadlyforce or through your favorite podcasting app.

This story was produced as part of APM Reports’ public media accountability initiative, which supports investigative reporting at local media outlets around the country. Support also came from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.