Prosecutors Need to be Allies in the Fight Against Police Brutality
The Intersection: Racial Justice
ERIC BAZAIL EIMIL: In 2020 alone, we have added George Floyd and Breonna Taylor to a tragically ever-growing list of Black victims of police brutality. For years, nothing has changed — the protests in Ferguson for Michael Brown, in Baltimore for Freddie Gray, in New York for Eric Garner and in Los Angeles for Rodney King haven’t eliminated police brutality in America. Neither has systemic reforms, including body cams, internal misconduct reviews, or community policing strategies. Through it all, prosecutors have rarely charged officers accused of misconduct and brought their cases to trial.
Yes, it is undeniable that police unions have consistently stood in the way of reform initiatives. For decades, they have worked to curry favor with prosecutors to insulate their members, preserving their authority. They have targeted prosecutors, like then San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, who have tried to hold their members accountable for wrongdoing and have resisted that pressure.
However, the onus has always rested on prosecutors to push back, and elected prosecutors have largely failed there. Elected prosecutors like Anne Marie Schubert of Sacramento, California, have gladly accepted thousands of dollars in campaign donations from the union, even when they come days after the shooting of unarmed Black men by police officers. Elected prosecutors like Michael Satz of Broward County, Florida, have been regularly accused of whitewashing police misconduct cases as they’ve served for decades in office. It was the prosecutorial profession that often turned a blind eye during the height of mass incarceration and the War on Drugs — all while Black Americans and other people of color were receiving harsher sentences and charges under blatantly discriminatory statutes.
Especially given the history of the profession and its historic failure in protecting Black Americans, prosecutors need to resist the political pressures imposed upon them by the police unions and begin holding officers accountable for deaths and injuries that occur on their watch.
The prosecutorial profession cannot claim to stand for justice when none of the six officers involved in the murder of Freddie Gray faced jail time. After one of the cases ended in a mistrial, over a year after his death, the District Attorney dropped all charges. Forced to do so, the office moved on.
How can the profession state that ‘Black Lives Matter’ when the district attorneys deflected the Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases to grand juries to avoid making the charging decisions themselves? These digressions are especially egregious given the history of grand juries as institutions that continually safeguard the actions of law enforcement over citizens.
Even now, when there was a clear video that shows George Floyd gasping for breath as officers placed their knees on his neck, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman dawdled on whether to bring charges against the four officers involved. The revelation that Senator Amy Klobuchar previously declined to prosecute one of the officers involved in Floyd’s death when she was Hennepin County Attorney in a 2006 misconduct case compounds this injustice. Eventually, the officers were charged, but it took nationwide protests and public outcry to raise Derek Chauvin’s indictment to second-degree murder and to charge the three officers who were present for the arrest as accessories to the crime.
This cowardice, hesitation, and utter failure to act undermines the power of the profession to make change happen in America. After all, as Jeffrey Toobin noted in the New Yorker back in May 2015:
“In the U.S. legal system prosecutors may wield even more power than cops. Prosecutors decide whether to bring a case or drop charges against a defendant; charge a misdemeanor or a felony; demand a prison sentence or accept probation. Most cases are resolved through plea bargains, where prosecutors, not judges, negotiate whether and for how long a defendant goes to prison. And prosecutors make these judgments almost entirely outside public scrutiny.”
Right now, we need tough prosecutors who are willing to use their influence to stand up for their communities and hold the powerful accountable in the service of true justice — whether it be the wealthy, the church or the police. This commitment is especially important given the fundamental lack of representation within most prosecutor offices. As one 2015 study pointed out, 95% of elected prosecutors were white and fourteen states have no elected prosecutors of color at all.
Prosecutors need to reject donations from police unions, open conviction review units, and publish more data on their office’s plea bargains. They need to share the breakdown of charging decisions by race, bring officers to trial, exercise their prosecutorial discretion more effectively when it comes to communities of color, and abandon the failed tough on crime policies of the past. And importantly, offices around the country need to invest more in recruiting Black attorneys and other attorneys of color to enter the practice. As Brenda Choresi Carter, Director of the Reflective Democracy Campaign, put it: “I think it’s a red flag to us and something that we need to grapple with as a society when the life experiences of the majority of the population are excluded from these powerful positions.”
If we want to restore faith in a fundamentally broken system and put those ideals of justice we’ve etched onto the walls of our courthouses, prosecutors have to step up. Otherwise, prosecutors will remain accomplices in perpetuating police brutality and the systematic oppression of Black Americans, rather than become the powerful allies they can, and should, be. I hope we don’t fail.
Eric Bazail Eimil is a sophomore in the School of Foreign Service studying Latin American and African Politics. A proud Cuban-American, his passions include Florida politics, US foreign policy towards emerging nations and America’s complex relationship with race, identity and power.