'Egregious': Texas woman Atatiana Jefferson's killing and 23 similar incidents nationwide cast scrutiny on police training.
Dick Tench dozed off in his easy chair at his Simpsonville, South Carolina, home on June 14 while watching TV in his den. His wife had already gone to bed and his mother-in-law, who was battling cancer, was asleep upstairs when a medical alert on her cellphone accidentally went off.About midnight, he was startled from sleep to find the beam of a flashlight bouncing off his walls, he said.
Experts say it comes down to inconsistent recruitment and training -- for 700,000 officers across some 18,500 departments -- and tragic mistakes, including showing up at the wrong house and not properly announcing as police. Beyond the cost of life, those mistakes have been costly for the municipalities involved in some cases, with multimillion-dollar settlements. And while most of the officers have been cleared of wrongdoing, some have faced criminal charges, including murder.
"My family, the Tench family, our hearts and prayers go out to the Jefferson family in Fort Worth. I know what we went through in the last four months and it's been absolutely horrendous, but it's nothing compared to what they're going to go through. It brings tears to my eyes," Tench said. "I don't know what their training is," Tench said in the"Nightline" interview."I just know that if an officer is sent out to a house on a medical alert or a wellness alert, I'm not sure having guns blazing would be protocol."
And in 2018, some of the 55 officers feloniously killed were attacked responding to calls to homes, including in Kentucky, where Pikeville Police Officer Scotty Hamilton was shot in the head during an ambush following a call for a suspicious person. In New York, a state trooper was fatally shot during a welfare check for a man threatening to shoot himself, the FBI said.
Tench's case is similar to that of Kenneth Chamberlain Sr., 68, who was shot to death in his White Plains, New York, home on Nov. 19, 2011, by police who responded to a welfare check after his medical alert device accidentally went off, according to a Department of Justice investigation. The contrition expressed by Fort Worth city leaders sounded all too familiar to attorney Art Brender, who represents the family of Jerry Waller, a 72-year-old homeowner shot to death in his own garage by a Fort Worth police officer who went to the wrong address to investigate a tripped burglar alarm.Brender said the Waller case is"very similar in some respects to the police shooting that tragically took the life of Atatiana Jefferson.
The Tarrant County District Attorney's Office presented the case to a grand jury, which declined to file charges against the officer. City officials say that since the Waller shooting, training for recruits and officers of the Fort Worth Police Department has become far more rigorous than other police departments throughout the state, and arguably the country.
"Since that year, Procedural Justice and de-escalation training have been incorporated in the recruit training for new officers," according to the city's statement to ABC News. -- The death of Mark Stephen Parkinson, 65, who was shot on Jan. 1, 2018, by a police officer who responded to his Rossville, Georgia, home at 3:15 a.m. to investigate a report made by his daughter's mother-in-law that she was threatening to harm her children, police said. The complaint against Parkinson's daughter, who was living with her parents while going through a divorce, was later deemed false, police said.
-- Just 15 months after Black's death, an Aurora police officer shot and wounded Andrew Huff, 22, in his home on Oct. 10, 2019. Police went to Huff's home after his roommate complained he was kicked out of the residence and assaulted by Huff, according to an incident report. When officers arrived at the home at 11:30 p.m., they claim Huff ran inside and reappeared in his front window with a shotgun, prompting an officer to open fire through the window, according to the report.
Like many African-American community activists, Tari Davis said he feels that black lives appear to be under siege by police in the United States more than any other race and statistics appear to bolster that contention. Davis said he was shot without warning when police fired at a suspect through his open back door in Milwaukee. The officer in the case, which remains open, has been placed on administrative leave.
Following Jefferson's shooting, Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, released a statement, saying, “We are deeply saddened and angered at the preventable loss of yet another innocent Black life -- especially in light of the policies that, had they been adhered to, could have prevented the killing of Atatiana Jefferson.” Over the past several years, there have been a number of innocent black men killed in high-profile police-involved shootings.
"So if there's a common thread, as revolting as these scenarios are, I think it's just a basic lack of decent training of officers," Ashmore told ABC News. "They could spend anywhere from an hour or as many as 20 hours on those procedures," Blum said."There's no standard for that. There's no standardized training for law enforcement across the country. It's fragmented. There's no consistency in the way we do business and the way we train people."
Andrew J. Scott III, the former police chief of Boca Raton, Florida, told ABC News that most police departments in the country require officers to do use-of-force training on either an annual or semi-annual basis. Clark, 22, was shot seven times in his grandmother's backyard by officers who mistook the cellphone in his hand for a gun. Police officials contend they chased Clark into the yard, suspecting he was responsible for breaking car windows in the neighborhood. In September, the city of Sacramento, California, agreed to pay Clark's two young sons $2.4 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit.
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