On his third day in office, US President Donald Trump used the day to issue full pardons to two Washington DC police officers found guilty in 2024 for an unauthorised chase that led to the death of an unarmed Black motorist.
In the same year that 20-year-old Karon Hylton-Brown was k*lled in the high-speed chase, officers in Louisville, Kentucky, used a no-knock warrant to enter 26-year-old Breonna Taylor’s apartment in 2020. A jury acquitted the officer who fired the fatal shot on all three counts of endangering her neighbours, whilst no charge was slapped on him for Taylor’s murder. Similarly, when 27-year-old Carlos Ingram Lopez died in 2020 in police custody while handcuffed and held down under plastic covers for 12 minutes in Tucson, Arizona, a court ruled that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict the officers, despite the police chief admitting it was a policy violation.
These are just a few out of thousands of examples illustrating how most US police officers do not face consequences for abuses of power that k*ll civilians in the line of duty. Thus, officers Terence D. Sutton, Jr., and Andrew Zabavsky were in the minority of those who do and Trump’s pardon only indicates that calls for more police accountability will fall on deaf ears yet again without an effective people-driven movement.
Sources:
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/03/us/brett-hankison-trial-closing/index.html