MILWAUKEE (AP) — A white Milwaukee police officer who was fired after he fatally shot a mentally ill black man in April won’t face criminal charges, the county’s top prosecutor said Monday.
Milwaukee County District Attorney John Chisholm said Christopher Manney won’t be charged because he shot Dontre Hamilton in self-defense. Manney is at least the third white police officer to not be charged in the past month after a confrontation that led to a black man’s death.
“This was a tragic incident for the Hamilton family and for the community,” Chisholm said in a statement. “But, based on all the evidence and analysis presented in this report, I come to the conclusion that Officer Manney’s use of force in this incident was justified self-defense and that defense cannot be reasonably overcome to establish a basis to charge Officer Manney with a crime.”
Attorneys for Manney and the Hamilton family did not immediately return messages seeking comment. Milwaukee police union president Michael Crivello said he would comment after a 10 a.m. news conference by the district attorney.
The executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Wisconsin, Chris Ahmuty, issued a statement saying the decision not to charge Manney left “a cloud of uncertainty over the circumstances of and the responsibility for Mr. Hamilton’s death.”
Manney shot 31-year-old Hamilton on April 30 after responding to a call for a welfare check on a man sleeping in a downtown park. Manney said Hamilton resisted when he tried to frisk him. The two exchanged punches before Hamilton got a hold of Manney’s baton and hit him on the neck with it, the former officer has said. Manney then opened fire, hitting Hamilton 14 times.
Several witnesses told police they saw Hamilton holding Manney’s baton “in an aggressive posture” before Manney shot him, according to Chisholm’s news release.
Hamilton’s family said he suffered from schizophrenia and had recently stopped taking his medication.
Police Chief Edward Flynn fired Manney in October. He said at the time that Manney correctly identified Hamilton as mentally ill, but ignored his training and department policy and treated him as a criminal by frisking him.
Hamilton’s death preceded the killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City, but the case hasn’t attracted as much attention despite frequent, mostly peaceful protests. Hamilton’s family has used the protests to try to raise awareness about mental illness. Others said his death underlined race concerns, chanting “people of color are people, too,” and carrying signs that read “black lives matter.”
The Milwaukee Police Association condemned Manney’s firing as a political move, and members voted no confidence in Flynn soon after the firing.
Manney has appealed his firing and applied for disability, saying the shootings in Milwaukee and Ferguson have cost him sleep and made it difficult for him to think clearly. He also has said he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.
Milwaukee police announced in December they would accelerate training that equips officers for dealing with crises, including encounters with the mentally ill. Only about 20 percent of the force’s roughly 1,800 officers have had the training
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Associated Press writers Scott Bauer in Madison, Wisconsin, and Carrie Antlfinger in Milwaukee contributed to this report.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Give a man a hammer and everything will look like nails to him. Police are taught to treat everyone like suspects, so that’s all they see. And while it’s definitely important for them to stay vigilant, politeness and respect are far better tools in most cases than barking orders and pulling guns.
Fear and respect are opposing ideas. Yet cops are trained to believe fear leads to respect. It’s entirely the opposite.
What you’ll never hear, a/k/a the truth:
“So I saw this lazy fucking n-bomb mooch sleeping on the bench and figured he must be strung out and high on something and that I could land myself an easy arrest by giving him the what-for and searching him for drugs and paraphernalia. I poke him with my nightstick and I tells him, I says, ‘get the fuck off my bench, coon’ and he gets up and starts talking all nonsense at me like he can’t string together a fucking sentence…so he’s clearly high and I figure I’ve got myself a live one. I shake my baton in his face and tell him to shut the fuck up and turn around so I can frisk him and he gets all uppity at me, like I’m the one who is bothering him, not the other way around, and he doesn’t have to do what I fucking say. So long story short, I grab him and jerk him around physically to let him know I’m fucking serious and start the frisk anyway, telling him to keep his hands in the air, but he goes fucking nuts, grabs my baton and whacks me across the back of my neck, which hurt real fucking bad, so I figure this n-bomb has it comin’ and it’s time I teach him a lesson since he’s now waving my baton around and looking like he’s on the attack. Emptied my clip in the bastard…won’t be disobeying his rightful betters anytime soon…”
Fin
Sad, but true.
Frankly, it’s startling how many people rightly denounce excessive police violence when they see it on video, yet continue to imagine that all the incidents that aren’t recorded happened exactly as the cop described. As if it’s purely coincidental that the ones on film happen to be the only ones where the police did anything wrong, as well as the only times they lie about what happened. Yet even when juries see the videos, they often trust the cop over their lying eyes.
If police truly care about justice, the first step is better training and to weed out the bad apples. If they can’t even police themselves, what good are they? But as long as they keep this Us v Them attitude and automatically protect criminals in their own ranks, they’ll continue to have problems. I’m sure it’s a tough job, but allowing bad cops to remain on the force only makes it tougher.
Manney had no reason to even touch the man, and without that the “need to subdue” would never have arisen. Time and again the pattern is the same ~ the police officer gets physical first, anything and everything is then taken for lethal escalation.
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In his suit to receive disability Manney now says he has PTSD. I hope he does recive treatment, but, Karma should dictate he receive the same treatment that Mr. Hamilton, the homeless young man he fired fourteen shots into and killed, received.