Ronell Foster was riding his bicycle through the hushed streets of Vallejo, Calif., one evening when a police officer noticed that the bike had no lights and that he was weaving in and out of traffic.
The officer, Ryan McMahon, went after Foster with lights flashing, siren blaring and the car’s spotlight pointed directly at him. Foster stopped. The pair exchanged words before Foster, who was on community supervision for a car theft conviction a month earlier, fled, eventually ditching the bicycle. McMahon caught up with Foster and jumped on top of him. The two struggled. McMahon, a rookie on the force, tasered the father of two and struck him several times with his department-issued flashlight. Gunfire erupted — seven shots total. When it was over, Foster, 33, lay dying in the bushes in a darkened courtyard near an apartment complex.
Solano County District Attorney Krishna Abrams declined to bring charges against McMahon, who is white, saying the February 2018 fatal shooting of Foster, who was Black and unarmed, was justified. In a Jan. 31, 2020 letter to the Vallejo police chief, Abrams said that Foster “posed an immediate and extreme threat” to McMahon and that it was “objectively reasonable for Officer McMahon to defend himself and open fire on Foster.”
A year later, he shot again.
This time, the victim was aspiring Black rapper Willie McCoy, who was asleep in his silver Mercedes CLS500 outside a Taco Bell shortly before 11 p.m. on Feb. 9, 2019. An employee called 911 to report that McCoy was slumped over the steering wheel and blocking the drive-thru. When McMahon and other officers arrived — six in all — one of them spotted a semiautomatic pistol in McCoy’s lap. As McCoy slowly awoke, he moved his hand to scratch his chest, according to a report by an expert the city hired to review the shooting. Cops believed he was reaching for the gun, so they fired 55 shots in 3.5 seconds. McMahon said he fired after believing that the officers and residents were in “imminent danger.” Officials cleared him for his role in that killing too, but he was fired last September for violating department policy during the shooting “by engaging in unsafe conduct and neglect for basic firearm safety,” a department official said.
“It’s a very sad situation,” McMahon, said in a brief interview with NPR. “It’s something I’m still dealing with. It hasn’t gone away.”
The deadly shooting of unarmed Black men and women by police officers in the U.S. has increasingly garnered worldwide attention over the last few years. The 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, sparked a week of protests that catapulted the Black Lives Matter movement into the national spotlight. Since then, tens of thousands of people across the country have taken to the streets to protest police brutality of Blacks by mostly white officers.
Since 2015, police officers have fatally shot at least 135 unarmed Black men and women nationwide, an NPR investigation has found. NPR reviewed police, court and other records to examine the details of the cases. At least 75 percent of the officers were white. The latest one happened earlier this month in Killeen, Texas, when Patrick Warren, Sr., 52, was fatally shot by an officer responding to a mental health call.
For at least 15 of the officers, like McMahon, the shootings were not their first—or their last, NPR found. They have been involved in two–sometimes three or more–shootings, often deadly and without consequences.
Those who study deadly force by police say it’s unusual for officers to be involved in any shootings.
“Many officers will go their entire career without shooting–sometimes without pulling their gun out at all,” said Peter Scharf, a criminologist and professor in the School of Public Health at Louisiana State University and author of The Badge and the Bullet: Police Use of Deadly Force. “It’s rare.”
Not every law enforcement agency releases detailed information about police shootings. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the Kansas City Police Department, for example, refused to release specifics such as officer names or their race, citing open investigations.
Still, NPR reviewed thousands of pages of job applications, personnel records, use of force reports, citizen complaints, court records, lawsuits, news releases, witness statements, and local and state police investigative reports to examine the backgrounds of the officers and analyze details of each shooting. We also interviewed use of force experts, criminologists, police, lawyers, prosecutors and relatives of victims.
Among NPR’s other findings:
At least six officers had troubled pasts before being hired onto police departments, including drug use and domestic violence. One officer had been fired from another law enforcement agency and at least two others were forced out.
Several officers were convicted of crimes while on the force, such as battery, and resisting and obstructing, but kept their jobs. In one instance, officials in a tiny Louisiana parish repeatedly fired and rehired a deputy who got into trouble with the law: three times over 30 years, records show.
More than two dozen officers have racked up citizen complaints or use of force incidents. A Fort Lauderdale police officer had 82 reviews for use of force incidents but was never found in violation; a Vineland, New Jersey officer had more than three dozen use of force incidents over a five-year period.
Several officers have violated their department policies and been cited for ethics violations, including a Hollywood, Florida officer accused of trying to steer business to his company, and an Arizona state trooper accused of misuse of state property.
Nineteen of the officers involved in deadly shootings were rookies, with less than a year on the force. One was on the job for four hours; another for four days. More than a quarter of the killings occurred during traffic stops, and 24 of the dead –18 percent–suffered from mental illness. The youngest person shot was a 15-year-old Balch Springs, Texas high-school freshman who played on the football team. The oldest was a 62-year-old man killed in his Los Angeles County home. Nearly 60 percent of the shootings occurred in the South, with more than a quarter in Texas, Georgia and Louisiana, NPR found.
The killings have led to at least 30 judgments and settlements totaling more than $142 million, records show. Dozens of lawsuits and claims are pending.
An examination of individual cases reveals the myriad ways that law enforcement agencies fail to hold officers accountable and allow them to be in a position to shoot again. In many instances, the criminal justice system refuses to prosecute, often resulting in departments putting officers back on the street instead of desk jobs where they have little contact with the public. Other times, police unions protect officers from accountability. And sometimes, departments are so desperate to recruit officers that they ignore warning signs such as an officer’s troubled past and hire them anyway.
“Why do they get passes on killing people?” asked Paula McGowan, Foster’s mother. “If the system was right…they would hold these people accountable.”
‘Unnecessary and unreasonable’
Nathaniel Pickett II was walking back to his $18-a-night room at the El Rancho, a seen-better-days bungalow motel along historic Route 66 in Barstow, California. It was shortly after 9 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2015, and Nate, as his family called him, often took evening walks. As the 29-year-old former engineering student crossed the street, he caught the eye of Kyle Woods, a San Bernardino sheriff’s deputy. Woods made a U-turn into the motel parking lot, jumped out of his cruiser and approached Pickett, police records show.
He demanded Pickett’s name and birthdate. Pickett complied. In fact, he did everything Woods asked of him, including taking his hands out of his pockets. When Woods asked him if he lived at the motel and where he was from, Pickett said he didn’t know. When Pickett asked if he had done something wrong, the deputy said he just wanted to talk to him.
“What’s the problem?” Pickett asked Woods nine different times as the deputy peppered him with questions about whether he had ever been arrested (yes), if he had lived in Barstow all of his life and where he was going.
“There is no problem,” Woods responded.
Pickett asked if he could go to his room where he had lived since moving to Barstow seven weeks earlier. Woods would later admit under oath that he knew he had no probable cause to arrest him and that Pickett had the right to walk away. But when he tried, Woods grabbed him and told him to “stop resisting.” Woods threatened to tase him. Pickett put his arms up and was running toward his room–Room 45–when he tripped and fell in the breezeway. As he scooted backward from Woods, the deputy caught him. The two scuffled while a male citizen volunteer on patrol with Woods watched from a few feet away. Woods punched Pickett 15 to 20 times before pulling out his service weapon and threatening to shoot him. He fired, hitting Pickett twice in the chest–once with the barrel of the gun pressed against the man’s chest.
Jones and others acknowledged that departments often hire officers like Presley because they’re desperate to recruit and are willing to ignore red flags.
“We need bodies,” Jones said. “Some places have been willing to lower the standards and bring bodies in, and it’s a recipe for disaster.”
Rosenfeld said that departments, mostly small ones that lack resources, are “more willing to look past misdeeds.”
“Small departments that are strapped for officers take them where they can find them,” he said.
Green’s death has prompted changes in the department, including mental health treatment for officers and a hiring board to review candidates, Jones said.
“It’s more important for us to move forward, train properly and to show that the stigma of what happened with Presley will not be tolerated,” he said.
LaMaurice Gardner, a police psychologist in Detroit, said the toll that one shooting–or more–takes on a police officer can be devastating.
“People don’t realize the psychological effects a shooting takes on an officer and their family,” said Gardner, who has worked as a reserve officer for 26 years in suburban Detroit. “You’re investigated like you’re a perpetrator. You can’t work on the street. You can’t get overtime. Your peer support is pulled away.”
Gardner acknowledged that departments face difficult issues now with police shootings, including of unarmed Black men and women..
“Are there bad cops out there? Hell, yeah, there are,” he said. “Policies need to be changed.”
