Do Fort Worth police shoot, kill at disproportionate rate? Here’s what the data says.
They opened the doors to let the cool breeze in on a night that finally felt like fall.
A 28-year-old woman and her nephew were playing a video game in the back bedroom. “Call of Duty” was their game of choice that night.
Suddenly, they heard noises in the back yard.
The woman stood up, grabbed a gun from her purse and peered out the window into the darkness.
Someone shouted for her to put her hands up. Less than a second later, a gunshot rang out.
Her 8-year-old nephew watched her fall to the floor.
On that October night, Atatiana Jefferson became the sixth person killed by Fort Worth police in 2019.
Jefferson, who was black, was shot by a white officer, Aaron Dean, who resigned days later and has been charged with murder.
The shooting blew wide open a discussion on police shootings in Fort Worth.
At a vigil for Jefferson, activist Cory Hughes declared it had been “a bloody summer in the city of Fort Worth.”
At City Council meetings, as many as 70 speakers have voiced outrage each week since the shooting, demanding accountability on what they call systemic racism in the city.
While passionate, speakers often cite incorrect statistics, repeating claims that Fort Worth “leads the nation” in officer-involved shootings.
Andrew Teeter, who didn’t use statistics, told the council Nov. 5 that Fort Worth had become notorious for shootings outside of Texas, citing conversations with friends.
“Our city is kind of an embarrassment right now,” he said. “It’s not just Texas. It’s not just the country.”
However, an analysis by the Star-Telegram found that in the past five years, Fort Worth police have been no more likely to kill people than their counterparts in similarly sized cities.
The Star-Telegram compared Fort Worth’s police shootings with shootings in 11 cities of similar size from 2014 to 2019. The cities ranged in population from 700,000 to 1.4 million people. Fort Worth has about 900,000 people.
In this comparison, the Star-Telegram found:
Fort Worth police shot 32 people, compared to the other cities’ average of 29.
- Fort Worth police killed 17 people, which matched the average for the other cities.
Fort Worth had the second-highest fatal police shooting rate per 100,000 people in 2019, and the third-highest such rate in 2018.
The data included any time an officer shot a person, even if the person did not die, and was gathered from police departments’ databases, open record requests, The Washington Post’s database on fatal shootings and other media reports.
“We want to lead the country in how not to have officer-involved shootings,” said Deborah Peoples, the chairwoman of the Tarrant County Democratic Party. “That’s why I fight so hard on this. We should not settle for ever being average; we have to be the leader for how it should be done.”
Experts caution that data on police shootings should be viewed critically because raw numbers cannot always capture the relationship between a city’s police department and its residents.
Seth Stoughton, a former police officer and associate professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law, said gathering data on police shootings is difficult and requires context, but is also important.
“There are lessons we can only learn by looking at the details of each shooting, and there are lessons we can only learn by looking at the data as a whole,” he said.
Factors in police shootings
David Klinger, professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, said population size, violent crime rate and police department size can affect how often officers shoot civilians.
Most police shootings happen when officers think someone has a gun. In 57% of shootings by police, officers said they thought the other person had a firearm, said Franklin Zimring, University of California-Berkeley law professor and author of “When Police Kill.”
Since June, five of the six people killed by Fort Worth police were armed, according to police reports. Jefferson was holding a gun legally in her own home, according to the arrest affidavit for Dean.
One of the people killed pointed a flashlight at officers, who said they thought it was a weapon. The victim had previously pointed a rifle at the officers in his front yard.
Fort Worth also had the third-lowest violent crime rate compared to the 11 other cities, according to the FBI’s uniform crime reporting statistics. Usually, Klinger said, more police shootings correlates with a higher violent crime rate.
The FBI’s violent crime statistic includes murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. The most recent data was from 2014.
But Zimring found that over a six-year period, one quarter of the fatal police shootings he studied began as disturbance calls, he said.
In Fort Worth, three of this year’s shootings began after police responded to nonviolent crime calls. Two were domestic disturbance calls, and police went to Jefferson’s house on an open structure call, which is when a door or window is open.
Racial disparity in shootings?
At a vigil for Jefferson, Peoples, the chairwoman of the Tarrant County Democratic Party, said police are going into black neighborhoods “in combat mode.”
Peoples said some Fort Worth officers respond differently when calls come from majority black or Hispanic neighborhoods.
“I have to believe that many of these folks want to do the right thing, but they come with preconceived notions about what happens in communities of color,” she said in an interview with the Star-Telegram. “You go in there thinking you have to be on high alert.”
Officers may have those preconceived notions about black communities without being aware of them, Stoughton, the associate law professor, said.
Peoples said the Fort Worth Police Department puts more negative attention on predominately black or Hispanic neighborhoods in east and south Fort Worth.
Police Sgt. Chris Daniels said via email that the police department directs resources to areas where crime trends are highest to keep residents in those areas safe.
Peoples said the city needs to have open conversations about racism in order to combat it, but she said city officials are not listening to the concerns of people of color.
“You have the opportunity right now to get out and be the model for the rest of the country and say, ‘When we were faced with this issue, we sat down and dealt with it. And it was emotional, and visceral and ugly, but we dealt with it. And we came out better for it,’” Peoples said.
On Nov. 8, city officials nominated an outside panel to investigate police policies and procedures in Fort Worth.
By the end of the year, the city also plans to hire a civilian police monitor and a diversity and inclusion director, who will lead a department designed to address disparities in city services.
Mayor Betsy Price also said the city is continuing to carry out Race and Culture Task Force recommendations. The task force, created after the 2016 arrest of a black woman who called police over a dispute with a neighbor, made 20 recommendations to address race and income disparities in Fort Worth.
Indictments of officers rare
Indictments of police officers involved in fatal shootings have typically been rare.
Of the 495 shootings analyzed by the Star-Telegram, only three resulted in the indictment of an officer on criminal charges.
Many shootings were pending review, even years later. In Dallas, for example, four police shootings from 2014 were still pending review, including two fatal shootings, according to the Dallas Police Department database. Dallas police did not respond to questions about these cases.
Dean is the second Fort Worth officer to be criminally charged in a shooting since 2015. In 2017, Officer Courtney Johnson was charged with assault after shooting a man who was holding a barbecue fork. The man survived, and Johnson’s charges were dropped after the jury deadlocked. The district attorney’s office declined to retry the case.
If indicted, Dean would be the first officer in Fort Worth to be indicted for a fatal shooting in at least 24 years.
However, in Dallas-Fort Worth five officers have been indicted in the past two years in connection with deaths in Dallas, Balch Springs, Arlington and Farmers Branch.
Zimring said in order for police to shoot fewer people, officers need clear regulations from department leaders. Those commands should include stop-shooting and don’t-shoot rules, he said.
“If it’s a brandished knife or toaster, or baseball bat, don’t shoot,” Zimring said. “If somebody is already on his back or on the ground, or running away, stop shooting.”
BEHIND THE STORY
MOREWhy we did this story:
The Fort Worth Star-Telegram gathered and analyzed police shooting data from 12 cities, including Fort Worth, following the fatal October shooting of Atatiana Jefferson.
Jefferson was inside her home when a neighbor called a non-emergency number to report doors at the house had been open for several hours. When police arrived, they parked their vehicles out of view, did not announce themselves and walked to the back yard. Fort Worth officer Aaron Dean shot Jefferson when she looked out the back window. He has since resigned and been charged with murder.
The shooting spurred protests and concern in the city. Because of this, we wanted to examine how Fort Worth police shootings compare to those in other cities.
This story was originally published November 14, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
