Last Tuesday in Madison, 40-year-old Keith Severson opened fire on an unarmed 25-year-old, Eugene Walker, shooting him dead with a total of seven bullets. One week later, he was cleared of any charges. Even considering the fact that Walker charged at Severson and was believed to have had a gun, there are not many who would not, at the very least, raise an eyebrow at the lenience of the judge. However, this confusion would be clarified instantly by adding that Severson has been a police officer for the Dane County sheriff’s department for the last 11 years.
In this country, police are very rarely held accountable for deaths they cause on the job. There are no readily-available hard numbers, but David Klinger, author of “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View on Deadly Force” has discovered that on-duty police who shoot citizens are prosecuted less than 2 percent of the time. Although police are in situations where self-defense is necessary exponentially more often than those in other professions, Klinger’s statistic is still startling. However, that percentage is a national average: data for just Wisconsin may give us even more pause.
Wisconsin law enforcement statutes do not require police officers to be submitted to external review. This means that police chiefs are responsible for evaluating their own officers, essentially evaluating their own effectiveness. It would be safe to assume that police chiefs are less inclined to negatively evaluate their officers than someone outside the sheriff’s department would be.
Also skewing the law in favor of police officers is the fact that they are often personally acquainted with district attorneys that try their cases. They have worked with the DA’s on investigations in the past and have forged relationships with them. When trying a case where the victim isn’t alive to give their side of the story, it’s easy for a district attorney to side with a police officer they know personally whose argument is self-defense.
While cases where police fatally shoot someone are relatively rare, they are not unheard of. The fact that a police officer did the shooting should not mean that a less-than-thorough investigation of the death is conducted. Officer Severson was cleared of any charges within a week of the incident, with District Attorney Ismael Ozanne saying that Severson was justified in shooting Walker seven times. While the details of the incident indicate that Walker was truly attacking Severson, bullets are not the only things that subdue an attacker. In fact, that is what Tasers are actually intended for.
A more extreme example of police using more force than necessary occurred in Kenosha in 2004. The Bell family watched their son Mike get fatally shot in the head by Kenosha police officers in their own driveway after what the family insists was an unlawful traffic stop. The Bell’s have funded a website, mikembell.com, to raise awareness about the incident in hopes of changing Wisconsin statues on the investigation of law enforcement officials. On the site, the family has compiled evidence showing that what the police claim led up to the shooting of their son is inconsistent with the forensic evidence. For example, the police claimed that Mike put his hand on an officer’s gun, even though no fingerprints or DNA were found on the weapon. All four police officers involved in the shooting were cleared of any wrongdoing in just two days. Mike was 21 and unarmed.
Police officers are tasked with an incredibly difficult and dangerous job, and their willingness to put their lives of the line should be commended. They should not, however, be given a get-out-of-jail-free card when they use more force than is necessary, and it should not be up to members of their own law enforcement communities to determine if their actions were justified.
We will never know what Eugene Walker may have done to Officer Severson if he had not been killed. We will never know if Mike Bell truly posed a threat to the officers that confronted him. What we do know is that the police officers that shot these men walked free with not even a slap on the wrist. It’s up to you to decide if the police applied the same laws to themselves to the same extent that they enforce in others. I, for one, am not convinced.
Allegra Dimperio ([email protected]) is a sophomore intending to major in journalism.
