America's police no longer get the benefit of the doubt

On the same day last week that former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted of killing George Floyd, 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant — a Black girl — was shot and killed by a police officer in Columbus, Ohio. The next day, the city's interim police chief released bodycam footage of the incident, showing that the officer shot four times as Bryant appeared to lunge with a knife toward another young Black woman at the scene.

In the not-so-distant past, there would be little public controversy over whether this shooting was justified. The police would probably say Bryant was threatening another person's life, and therefore lethal force was necessary. The public would defer to the police report and, with sad resignation, move on.

Not so in this case. Instead, the video has raised a host of new, very reasonable questions — about whether police officers need to be better trained in non-lethal techniques to defuse dangerous situations, about how society perceives and treats Black girls, and even whether Bryant was failed by Ohio's social services system. (She was in foster care at the time of her death.)

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"Ma'Khia was a good student, a good person, and did not deserve what happened to her," her family said in a statement. "We are deeply disturbed by the disproportionate and unjustified use of force in this situation."

A year after Floyd died under Chauvin's knee, and nearly a decade after Trayvon Martin's death in Florida helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement, the response to Ma'Khia Bryant's death demonstrates that something important has happened. The police in America haven't been defunded. To a significant degree, however, they have been de-trusted — stripped of the presumption that the "official" version of deadly events is true, and no longer given automatic deference when Black men and women die or allege brutality at their hands.

Instead, when their encounters with the public go bad, officers and the departments they represent are increasingly scrutinized by the public and media for missteps, malice, and racism. In just the last few weeks, The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and other national news organizations have prominently featured stories of violent police encounters: a Black woman pulled out of a car by her dreadlocks in North Carolina; a Black Army officer pepper-sprayed in Virginia; the deadly police shootings of Adam Toledo in Chicago, Daunte Wright in Minnesota, and Andrew Brown Jr. in (again) North Carolina. Black Americans have long known about the danger that looms over their every interaction with law enforcement. Finally, this is getting the attention it deserves, and media coverage has accordingly grown both in volume and skepticism of the authorities.

This is a good development. Those who possess great power should be accountable for it, and there may be no greater power in society than to take a life with the backing of state authority. Even if deference were somehow appropriate in such circumstances, American police have forfeited it by too often taking liberties with truth, resisting disclosure, and evading consequences for their actions. In Minnesota, Floyd's death was initially reported by the Minneapolis Police in misleadingly anodyne terms; it took the emergence of Darnella Frazier's cell phone video for the truth to emerge. Even now, Chauvin remains the first and only white officer in the state to be convicted for killing a Black man. It is clear that much more reform is needed.

No doubt Bryant's case is a hard one. Perhaps different information will emerge, but the video evidence we've seen so far does seem to show that Bryant had put another girl's life in immediate danger. Was there a way to neutralize Bryant without killing her? The grappling with Ma'Khia Bryant's death must deal with the question of the other girl's life, and how she should have been protected in that terrible moment. That may trouble activists who have become rightly wary of bad-faith "he's no angel" arguments from police defenders and allies used to blame Black men and women — Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Breonna Taylor, and others — for their own deaths. The question is still important.

If American police no longer get the benefit of the doubt in difficult cases, it is their own fault. Yes, there are many good men and women who serve in law enforcement — but also, as we have seen, a fair number of armed bullies who, over the decades, have been protected from accountability by their badge, their unions, and the law. The Bryant case and its aftermath show what happens when police lose the trust of their communities. They will have to earn it back.