Less than a year into the post-Obama milieu, yet another major police shooting trial—the Jason Stockley case in St. Louis—produced a widely denounced verdict that reminds us how difficult it is to hold police officers accountable when they murder African Americans. Then-St. Louis police officer Stockley shot and killed Anthony Lamar Smith as he fled off in a vehicle. This happened in 2011, almost three years before the police killing of Michael Brown in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. Which means it happened years before the 21st Century Policing reforms that followed the outrage and national outcry behind the Ferguson police killing.
The verdict in the Stockley case, however, arrived last week, well after the installation of those reforms, which were an attempt at a policing reconstruction era of sorts. Those reforms are currently being starved out by the Trump administration, though, before they even had a chance to kick in.
