National overview
Why Kenosha Police will not be prosecuted
On Tuesday, Wisconsin authorities announced they would not prosecute Rusten Sheskey, the officer who shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake in August last year – an incident that led to protests and riots in Kenosha, a city near the Illinois border. originated. To justify this decision, they released two reports, one from the Kenosha County District Attorney’s Office and another from Noble Wray, a retired police chief and an Obama administration reformer who was asked to conduct an independent review. liver. shooting remains unclear, mainly because Kenosha police did not have body cameras at the time. The incident was captured only on bystanders’ cellphones, videos of which do not show the whole situation. But as far as the issue of criminal prosecution is concerned, the documents are very compelling: there is no way to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sheskey shot without justification. The evidence gives a hint in the opposite direction. Officer Sheskey and two other police officers turned up in response to a call from Laquisha Booker, the mother of Blake’s children. She said Blake took the keys to her rental vehicle, and that he had borrowed and crashed vehicles from her in the past. She added that Blake ‘should not have been here’, but that she would have him visit for his son’s birthday. Police dispatches told officers Blake had a warrant for assaulting domestic violence and sexual assault, meaning they must arrest him if they find him, according to Kenosha police policy. witness, Booker said Blake was trying to take her car and her children – and Blake was seen putting a child in a gray SUV. Sheskey said he was not sure if the child was Blake’s or not. In fact, there were three kids in the SUV, all Blake’s. The cops tried to arrest Blake. He resisted. Two different officers shot him with Tasers, but he plucked out the sins. And to make matters worse, Blake manufactured a knife. Despite some allegations in the media that Blake was ‘unarmed’, he admitted that he had the knife himself. There is a video of the officers telling him to drop it, and the weapon was found open in the SUV after the incident. According to the report from the DA office, Blake also opposed the arrest with a knife during an incident in 2010. As seen in the widespread cell phone video, Blake walked around the SUV and opened the door. Sheskey follows and grabs Blake’s shirt and then shoots down seven times. He says he stopped shooting when Blake dropped the knife, in line with his training to shoot until the threat stopped. Were the shots justified? The key question is whether Sheskey reasonably believed that lethal force was necessary to stop a looming threat of ‘death or great bodily harm’, either to him or to anyone else. Sheshkey, another officer, and some witnesses say Blake turned his body to Sheskey. before the shots were fired, which would have moved the knife to the officer. According to the district attorney’s office, Officer Sheskey said Jacob Blake had intended to do harm for the first time [as opposed to just resisting arrest] by driving the knife to Officer Sheskey’s torso. “Such an action would clearly justify lethal violence, but this gesture is not clear in the video, at least not for me. (You can watch the recording on YouTube and move frame-by-frame with the “<” and “>The buttons on your keyboard.) That said, I would also not say that the video refutes these allegations – the more important question in court, where the burden is on the prosecution – because the door of the SUV and the bodies of the police part of the Blake’s movements. And in any case, as Noble Wray’s report adds, whether or not Blake drove the knife forward, a reasonable officer may consider himself an impending danger. PO Sheskey literally held Blake’s shirt, and Blake had a knife in his hand, actively resisting him and trying to get into the vehicle. These circumstances are only united with the children who are in the vehicle. Of course, it was Sheskey’s own decision to grab Blake’s shirt, and there are various ways we can guess the officers’ actions, even if we do not prosecute them. But when it comes to these important last moments, the truth is that Blake put them in an impossible situation. They could have kept a safe distance from the man with a sexual assault warrant armed with a knife, but that would have meant the man had to get into a vehicle that they said contained at least one child – an option leading to a high-speed chase or a hostage situation, both possibilities which Sheskey says he feared at the time. On the other hand, once Sheskey gets closer to a knife-moving suspect, the chances of him needing lethal force are shot up, because knives are incredibly lethal at that distance and there is not much time to determine and focus on them. does not respond to a suspect’s movements. Or, as Wray put it:> Officer Sheskey determined that it was dangerous for the public and the child in the car to let Blake go. PO Sheskey felt he could not withdraw once he made the decision that the children or the public could be harmed. I found that Officer Sheskey’s analysis was reasonable based on the limited information he had at the time. Officer Sheskey did not know the relationship between Blake and the child. I’m not sure if that makes a big difference. The U.S. Department of Justice reported in 2010 that 200,000 children are mostly abducted by a family friend or parent. Blake’s serious resistance to being arrested would make a reasonable officer believe he would pursue a swift pursuit. I have no idea what would actually have happened if Sheskey had not shot. I’m glad I did not have to make the decision myself. And I’m glad prosecutors are not dragging this situation out by pursuing a case they could never win.