Just weeks before residents of Atlanta shut down their own streets over the police shooting deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in other parts of the country, Deravis Caine Rogers was shot dead by police in their own Georgia city.
He was African American, unarmed, and provided “no provocation” for the shooting, according to police.
His case didn’t attract the attention that other police shootings caught on cellphone videos have. But in a rare development, the officer who fired the gun, James Burns, has already been charged with murder and fired.
It is the first time in six years that a district attorney in Georgia has charged an officer without the officer first appearing before a grand jury for indictment.
“The decision of APD [Atlanta police department] to terminate and of DA Paul Howard to prosecute Officer James Burns for the killing of Caine Rogers does indeed mark an unprecedented shift in how Atlanta and Fulton County hold police accountable for their actions,” said Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, based in Atlanta.
Criminal charges against police for fatal incidents have been extremely rare nationwide. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis found that over a seven-year period ending in 2011, just 41 people were charged. During that same period the FBI count found that there were 2,718 “justified homicides” by law enforcement – a figure that is known to dramatically undercount police killings. A project by the Guardian found that in 2015 alone, there were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
On the day of the shooting, Burns had been called to an apartment complex after a report that a pedestrian was spotted looking into cars in a suspicious manner. Burns claims that when he arrived on the scene, a vehicle quickly pulled out of where it was parked, coming down the hill toward Burns’ car.
In Burns’s statement of events, he moved his car to try to block Rogers by pulling sideways in front of it, but Rogers continued past in what Burns called an attempt to run him over.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ting-deravis-rogers-james-burns-murder-charge
He was African American, unarmed, and provided “no provocation” for the shooting, according to police.
His case didn’t attract the attention that other police shootings caught on cellphone videos have. But in a rare development, the officer who fired the gun, James Burns, has already been charged with murder and fired.
It is the first time in six years that a district attorney in Georgia has charged an officer without the officer first appearing before a grand jury for indictment.
“The decision of APD [Atlanta police department] to terminate and of DA Paul Howard to prosecute Officer James Burns for the killing of Caine Rogers does indeed mark an unprecedented shift in how Atlanta and Fulton County hold police accountable for their actions,” said Xochitl Bervera, director of the Racial Justice Action Center, based in Atlanta.
Criminal charges against police for fatal incidents have been extremely rare nationwide. A 2014 Wall Street Journal analysis found that over a seven-year period ending in 2011, just 41 people were charged. During that same period the FBI count found that there were 2,718 “justified homicides” by law enforcement – a figure that is known to dramatically undercount police killings. A project by the Guardian found that in 2015 alone, there were 1,134 deaths at the hands of law enforcement.
On the day of the shooting, Burns had been called to an apartment complex after a report that a pedestrian was spotted looking into cars in a suspicious manner. Burns claims that when he arrived on the scene, a vehicle quickly pulled out of where it was parked, coming down the hill toward Burns’ car.
In Burns’s statement of events, he moved his car to try to block Rogers by pulling sideways in front of it, but Rogers continued past in what Burns called an attempt to run him over.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...ting-deravis-rogers-james-burns-murder-charge
