Rekia Boyd
On Monday afternoon, three years after he shot and killed Rekia Boyd, Chicago police officer Dante Servin
had all charges dismissed against him by Judge Dennis Porter. Charged with manslaughter and reckless use of a firearm, few cases appeared as open and shut against a violent officer as this one.
On March 21, 2012, Rekia Boyd and three of her friends were walking to a store together. Dante Servin, an off-duty police officer, was nearby in his car, and claimed that they were too loud and that he told the group to be quiet. The officer, still in the car, then fired five shots over his shoulder and struck Rekia Boyd in the head and her boyfriend, Antonio Cross, in the hand.
Officer Servin used the virtually unbeatable claim that he feared for his life because he saw Antonio Cross reach into his waistband and pull out a gun. Except Antonio Cross didn't have a gun. Nobody there had a gun except for Officer Dante Servin. Nobody reached in a waistband and pulled out a gun. The entire defense was completely imagined.
A growing and dangerous legal precedent already exists for white officers to claim they feared a threat of deadly harm from imaginary guns held by black people.
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Kendrec McDade, an All State football player and college freshman from Pasadena, California, was shot over and over again by police officers who claimed not only that they saw his gun, but that they saw and heard him shoot at them multiple times—even describing the flash from the muzzle of his gun. He was completely unarmed. This bogus defense held up and the officers who killed McDade weren't even charged with a crime.
Amadou Diallo, a hardworking man on his way home from work in the Bronx, was shot at 41 times and killed by four NYPD officers who claimed they believed he was a criminal and that they believed he pointed a gun at them. He was unarmed and only had his wallet. This defense was more than enough to set the officers free.
In fact, of the thousands and thousands of men and women killed by police in the United States, the "I feared for my life when I saw them reach for their waistband" defense is constant because it works.
But unarmed men and women don't reach in their waistband and pull out imaginary weapons. Only police who want to beat charges make this claim, and the fact that it works exposes a fatal flaw in the law.
Servin's defense said he feared for his life, and claimed to see Cross pull a gun from his waistband and point it at him, he then fired in self-defense. A gun was never recovered.
After the judge's decision, Boyd's family, friends and supporters cried foul and were extremely upset.
"I am Rekia Boyd's mom. They just found this man not guilty on all counts, and he blew my daughter's brains out in the alley," said Angela Helton.
"I will never be able to call Rekia again. I will never be able to say 'Rekia, can you come over and do this?' I will never be able to do that," Sutton said.
It cannot and should not ever be enough for an officer of the law to fire his or her firearm into a crowd of people purely based on their imagination of a threat. The threat must either be real and verifiable or significant consequences must exist when an officer acts on imagination and it turns out that the scary black man with a gun was actually a non-violent citizen with a phone, wallet, or some other harmless item.
On March 21, 2012, Officer Dante Servin fired five shots, from his car, over his shoulder into a crowd of four unarmed people in a dark alley. If this doesn't fit the very definition of recklessness, then the law is unjust. Furthermore, in the case of shooting deaths of Rekia Boyd, Kendrec McDade, and Amadou Diallo, nearly $10 million in settlements has been paid to the families of these victims for their wrongful deaths.
In essence, cities are perfectly willing to admit that their officers wrongfully shot and killed unarmed men and women, but the justice system all but refuses to hold officers accountable. In a mind-blowing study done by the Washington Post and Bowling Green State University it was determined that only about 1 in 1,000 officers who kill someone are ever convicted of a crime, and that officers who were generally thought to be guilty are set free regularly.
Our justice system is fully and completely broken—and beautiful young souls like Rekia Boyd, Kendrec McDade, and Amadou Diallo are paying the heaviest and ugliest price.
