One of those two cases stemmed from Floyd’s death all four officers have been charged but not yet adjudicated. Five cases also led to criminal charges for the officers involved, but those charges were later dropped in all but two cases. Just five cases resulted in demotion or firing, although some agencies do not release that information, so the count could be higher. In virtually every case, the officers involved faced little repercussion outside being placed on temporary administrative leave pending the outcome of an investigation. Sometimes, the victims requested police assistance themselves. Many were stopped for minor infractions, or because they fit the description of a suspect, or because they were acting erratically due to drugs or mental illness. But in more than half of the 32 incidents USA TODAY analyzed, the victim was a Black male three in four were nonwhite. Separately, the FBI in 2019 began collecting use-of-force data from the nation’s 18,000 police agencies, but it has yet to publish any data, and less than half of agencies have participated in the voluntary program, the FBI said.ĭyksma was white. The 2013 passage of the Death in Custody Reporting Act requires the federal government to track fatal detentions, arrests and incarcerations. The incidents, which were identified by combing through court cases and media reports, are by no means a complete account.Īt least 134 people have died in police custody from “asphyxia/restraint” in the past decade alone, even though many apparently did not - or could not - express difficulty breathing, according to a review of Fatal Encounters, a searchable database of people who died while interacting with police. USA TODAY examined 32 fatal police encounters since 2010 in which victims said they couldn’t breathe while being restrained. But across the country, dozens of people have died in police custody under similar circumstances. The phrase has become an international rallying cry against police brutality after the high-profile deaths of Eric Garner in 2014 and George Floyd on Memorial Day. In all three cases, the unarmed men uttered the same phrase as police wrestled them into custody. He was removed from life support days later. Three officers in Aurora, Colorado, tackled Elijah McClain as he walked home with groceries, using a stranglehold around his neck and handcuffing him as he pleaded and vomited. In Phoenix, four police officers placed the weight of their bodies on Muhammad Abdul Muhaymin’s head, neck, back and limbs as he lay face-down and handcuffed before going into cardiac arrest and dying. In Columbus, Georgia, a 300-pound police officer sat on Hector Arreola’s back while another held a knee to his neck and kept him face down outside his neighbor’s house for six minutes until he stopped moving and later died. More than half were Black men three in four were nonwhite. Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported the percentage of Black detainees who stated that they could not breathe.
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