California Weighs When Police Can Use Deadly Force
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2019
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Stephon Clark was shot and killed by police officers in his grandmother’s backyard on March 18th, 2018. He was black. He was unarmed. Last month, the Sacramento DA decided not to press charges against the two officers who fatally shot Clark citing an honest and “reasonable” threat to the police officers' safety. In California, and across much of America, the word “reasonable” is enough to get officers off the hook when deadly force is used. Will the California state Legislature change that?
Guest: Laurel Rosenhall, reporter at CALmatters and host of Force of Law, a narrative podcast series following the debate in California on the use of deadly police force.
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Podcast production by Mary Wilson, Jayson De Leon, and Anna Martin.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Back in the afternoon. |
| 0:07.0 | I want to start by saying a few things, the most important of which is an apology to the Clark family. |
| 0:15.0 | Back in March, the Sacramento District Attorney announced a surprise press conference for noon on a Saturday. |
| 0:21.7 | We were all kind of like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. A rainy Saturday. |
| 0:26.5 | Laurel Rosenhall, a reporter at Cal Matters, she'd been waiting for this moment for weeks. |
| 0:31.3 | There is no question that the loss of life, no matter what the circumstances are, is always sober and very serious. |
| 0:41.9 | The DA was calling everyone in to announce |
| 0:43.9 | whether she would be prosecuting the officers who killed Stefan Clark. |
| 0:47.8 | 22-year-old Clark had been shot multiple times |
| 0:50.7 | by the police in his grandmother's backyard. |
| 0:53.3 | He was black. He was unarmed. |
| 0:55.8 | You know, she had this PowerPoint with embedded videos. She had this enormous binder on her |
| 1:01.9 | kind of podium that she was referring to. She was pacing around the room the way you could |
| 1:06.3 | imagine a prosecutor pacing around a courtroom. It seems like she was litigating it. |
| 1:23.0 | Oh, she spent basically an hour before she even announced her decision describing all of the circumstances and the facts as the district attorney's office determined them. |
| 1:26.0 | Was there a moment where you were like, I know where this is going? |
| 1:27.1 | Yeah. Yeah. |
| 1:40.6 | This moment, it was when the DA started talking about whether the police could have honestly and reasonably believed they were in danger. |
| 1:45.5 | Did the officers have an honest and reasonable belief that they needed to defend themselves? |
| 1:50.2 | Laurel heard those words and was like, here we go again. |
| 1:56.9 | Pretty much, I mean, it just comes up in case after case after case. |
| 2:02.6 | She's talking about the reasonable standard. The idea that a reasonable officer would have felt threatened, justifying the use of deadly force. It's why the DA determined this shooting was a |
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