When Ernesto Ball was a kid, he knew many children in his community who wanted to be police officers.
That’s not the case anymore, he said, due to the dozens of cases of officer-involved shootings and alleged police brutality making national headlines. Now, he said, children in the black community are scared of police officers.
“It’s sad,” he said.
A Columbus police officer fatally shot Ball’s cousin, 26-year-old Ricky Ball, after Ricky fled a traffic stop in October 2015. The city council fired Boykin weeks later for violating numerous city policies — including failing to turn on his body camera before or during the shooting incident. The Mississippi Attorney General’s office has also indicted Boykin of manslaughter for the shooting, and the trial is scheduled for October in Walthall County Circuit Court following a local judge agreeing with a motion to change venue.
Ernesto hopes for a conviction. But the national trend of juries acquitting officers charged in shootings concerns him.
“The way that it is now is no different than the 1960s,” Ball said. “You can see a person get killed by a police officer, but the police officer still gets acquitted.”
In less than a month, juries acquitted two police officers in the Midwest who fatally shot someone while on duty.
On Wednesday, a former police officer in Wisconsin, Dominique Heaggan-Brown, was acquitted in the reckless homicide of Sylville Smith, who was shot during a foot chase through Milwaukee in August of last year. Earlier this month, St. Anthony, Minnesota, police officer Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted in the shooting death of Philando Castile, whose girlfriend filmed the aftermath of the shooting. In May, an officer in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was acquitted for shooting an unarmed man.
National news outlets like The Washington Post and The Huffington Post reported that no officer was convicted on either murder or manslaughter in cases of police shootings in 2014 or 2015, despite hundreds of such shootings per year.
Ernesto worries Boykin’s word will carry more weight with the jury once it convenes in Tylertown in October. Plus, Ernesto called Walthall County, in South Mississippi, “good ol’ boy.”
Another Ball cousin, Latoya Jones, agrees.
“Of course, that’s an issue,” she said. “… We’re very confident in Christ and his judgment. But let’s be honest: the good ol’ boy system is still alive and well in Mississippi. That’s well-known nationwide, and it’s very well-known here.”
Sympathetic juries
Tupelo-based attorney Jim Waide, who is representing Boykin, admitted there’s a difference in criminal proceedings when defendants are police officers versus when they’re civilians.
“Typically the same principles should apply,” he said. “But, generally, it’s very rare for a law enforcement officer to ever be convicted of excessive force. It’s very rare. In Mississippi, juries are very sympathetic toward law enforcement.”
Boykin is the first law enforcement officer Waide has defended — when he usually comes up against these type of cases, he’s often suing the officer on behalf of a victim.
“In general, in order to indict a law enforcement officer, you have to have some powerful evidence,” he said.
As for Boykin’s case, Waide didn’t offer much detail, except to say, “I’m very surprised he got indicted.”
Officer-involved cases often go to federal court because district attorneys depend on law enforcement to prosecute all of their cases, creating what could be viewed as a conflict of interest. District Attorney Scott Colom handed the Boykin investigation to the AG’s office to avoid such a conflict, and the case remained on the circuit court level.
Role reversal
John Hailman was a federal prosecutor in north Mississippi from 1974 to 2007, and he’s well acquainted with the difficulty of convicting law enforcement officers. He generally had one or two cases per year with police officers as defendants, and it took several tries and several years of experience before he got convictions, he said.
They were either brutality cases — a case in which the officer was accused of beating up a suspect — or officer-involved shootings, which he said were far less common. Either way, those were his most challenging cases.
“Most of them never arrive at a trial,” he said. “The evidence wasn’t strong enough. But when we did go to trial, they were difficult.”
Jurors tend to trust police officers, and they certainly trust officers more than suspects in crimes, who are usually the victims in officer brutality cases, Hailman said. Those people are hard to sell to juries as credible.
The process is also jarring for the attorneys, Hailman said.
“The biggest difficulty is role reversal,” he said. “As a prosecutor, you’re always on the side of the police. … And you’re prosecuting somebody using the law enforcement officers as witness. In (brutality cases), the officer is the defendant, and the person who is probably the accuser — someone’s who has either been arrested or is being arrested — you’re supposed to be on their side.”
A prosecutor is used to looking for jurors who sympathize with the police — a pretty easy task as most people believe police are simply trying to do their jobs, Hailman said. But in the case when the defendant is an officer who allegedly beat someone in custody or shot a suspect without cause, prosecutors want jurors who mistrust the police — ideally, Hailman said, people who have themselves been beaten up while in police custody.
Race and the ‘code of silence’
Race plays a factor, too, though not as much as the media makes it seem, he said. Media care more when it’s a white officer versus a black victim or, alternatively, a black officer versus a white victim — it’s less of a story if the two are the same race.
“If the victim’s black and the officer’s white, you just try to find a jury that’s not prejudiced,” he said.
In a few cases where white police officers were charged, Hailman said he’s seen a white member of the jury pool attempt to be excused because he or she didn’t want to be in the position to possibly convict a white police officer.
As for the cases themselves, there needs to be solid evidence. Prosecutors have to be certain the officer did what they’re accused of.
It also helps to have a police officer as a witness.
“If one police officer says another police officer is wrong and guilty, you may well get a conviction,” he said. “Without a police officer witness, you probably don’t have a chance.”
If he looked hard, he could find an officer who would testify, but if often ruined that officer’s career.
“There is such a thing as a code of silence, and any officer who testifies against another officer probably is not going to be welcome,” Hailman said. “The others will shun him. And most of them I saw after a couple of years had to find another job.
“The officers go through so much together, they’re loyal to each other,” he added.
People trust law enforcement, Hailman said, but they should also hold them to a higher standard.
“I’m very pro-law enforcement,” Hailman said. … “But on the other hand, all good law enforcement officers hate it when one of their group beats up on somebody whose handcuffed and helpless. Good officers hate it when other officers do wrong.”
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