A New York Times investigation found that over the past five years, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding guns or knives and were not under pursuit for violent crimes -- a rate of more than one a week.
Most of the officers did so with impunity. Only five have been convicted of crimes in those killings, according to a review of the publicly reported cases.
Yet local governments paid at least $125 million to resolve about 40 wrongful-death lawsuits and other claims.
Many stops began with common traffic violations like broken taillights or running red lights. And relative to the population, Black drivers were overrepresented among those killed.
"I am going to shoot you. What part of that don't you understand?" threatened an officer in Little Rock, adding a profanity as she tried to pry James Hartsfield from his car.
The officer who issued those warnings had stopped the motorist for a common offense. Hartsfield was not armed. Within moments of pulling him over, the officer fatally shot him.
Hartsfield's death is part of a series of such killings across the United States.
The recurrence of such cases and the rarity of convictions both follow from an assertion, ingrained in court precedents and police culture, of the danger that vehicle stops pose to officers. Claiming a sense of mortal peril -- whether genuine in the moment or only asserted later -- has often shielded officers from accountability for using deadly force.
"We get into what I would call anticipatory killings," said Sim Gill, the district attorney for Salt Lake County, Utah. "We can't give carte blanche to that."
In case after case, officers said they had feared for their lives. And in case after case, prosecutors declared the killings of unarmed motorists legally justifiable. But The New York Times reviewed video and audio recordings, prosecutor statements and court documents, finding patterns of police conduct that went beyond recent high-profile deaths of unarmed drivers.
Evidence often contradicted the accounts of law enforcement officers.
Dozens of encounters appeared to turn on what criminologists describe as officer-created jeopardy: Officers regularly -- and unnecessarily -- placed themselves in danger by standing in front of fleeing vehicles or reaching inside car windows, then fired their weapons in what they later said was self-defense.
In many cases, police officers, state troopers or sheriff's deputies responded with outsize aggression to disrespect or disobedience -- a driver talking back, revving an engine or refusing to get out of a car.
In dashboard and body camera footage, officers could be seen shooting at cars driving away, threatening deadly force in their first words to motorists, or surrounding sleeping drivers with a ring of gun barrels -- then shooting them when, startled awake, they tried to take off. More than three-quarters of the unarmed motorists were killed while attempting to flee.
Some families of the drivers said their relatives were not blameless.
"I don't have my head buried in the sand," said Deborah Lilly, whose 29-year-old son, Tyler Hays, had drugs in his car and tried to run away when he was pulled over for tinted windows last year by a sheriff's deputy in Hamilton County, Tenn. "I am just saying he did not deserve to get shot in the back."
Over the next three months, the deputy shot at two other unarmed drivers, wounding one.
Almost all of the officers involved in these cases declined to comment or could not be reached.
OFFICERS' WARINESS
Traffic stops are by far the most common police encounters with civilians, and officers have reason to be wary in their approach. They do not know who is inside a car or whether there are weapons.
Ten officers have been killed this year in such interactions, including a Chicago officer who was shot in August by a passenger during a traffic stop for an expired registration. But some police chiefs and criminologists said that alarmist training about vehicle stops has made officers too quick to shoot at times, resulting in needless killings.
Academies and commanding officers often rely on misleading statistics, gory police-killing videos and simulated worst-case scenarios to instill hypervigilance.
"All you've heard are horror stories about what could happen," said Sarah Mooney, assistant police chief in West Palm Beach, Fla. "It is very difficult to try to train that out of somebody."
The overemphasis on danger has fostered tolerance for police misconduct at vehicle stops, some argue.
"Prosecutors and courts give more leeway to officers' decisions to use force at vehicle stops, as a result of the exaggerated concern about the potential for officers getting hurt," said Michael Gennaco, a consultant to police departments on officer accountability and a former Justice Department prosecutor. "Officers would likely kill fewer drivers if there were deterrence."
In February, three sheriff's deputies surrounded a beat-up Mercedes with a broken taillight in Clark County, Wash. The tools strewn across the passenger seat worried them immediately, they later told investigators.
"That right there can hurt someone," said Deputy Holly Troupe.
The driver's retorts set off more alarms.
"You need to chill out!" she recalled him parroting back to her.
To help force him out of the car, Deputy Sean Boyle punched the driver in the nose. Troupe grabbed him below the jaw in what she called "pain compliance." But the driver, Jenoah Donald, a 30-year-old mechanic who had autism and struggled with drug addiction, started the car with one hand and clutched Boyle's ballistic vest with the other, the lawman later said.
Boyle, though he had 70 pounds on the driver, told investigators that he had feared he might be stuck half-inside a moving car.
"I was convinced, 'This is how you are going to die,'" he later told investigators.
So he shot Donald in the head.
Prosecutors questioned whether the stop would have ended differently if the officers had explained to the driver why they were ordering him to leave the car. But Boyle, with two decades on the job, had fired "in good faith," the prosecutors concluded.
"I know from the academy that they tell you traffic stops and DVs [domestic violence cases] are the most dangerous thing we'll do," Troupe, a rookie, told investigators. "I thought, 'This is why they tell us that.'"
Of the roughly 280 officers killed on duty since late 2016, about 60 died -- mostly by gunfire -- at the hands of motorists who had been pulled over, a Times analysis showed. About 170 other officers died in accidents on the job.
But the assertions about the heightened danger don't account for the fact that vehicle stops far outnumber every other kind of police dealings with civilians.
Because the police pull over so many cars and trucks -- tens of millions each year -- an officer's chances of being killed at any vehicle stop are less than 1 in 3.6 million, excluding accidents, two studies have shown. At stops for common traffic infractions, the odds are as low as 1 in 6.5 million, according to a 2019 study by Jordan Blair Woods, a law professor at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.
Many of the fatal vehicle stops reviewed by the Times unfolded in a similar way: Officers acted as if their lives were in constant peril and killed drivers who failed to obey orders.
"The fear is excessive," said Grant Fredericks, an authority on the forensic analysis of dashboard and body camera footage and a former officer who has examined scores of police shootings at vehicle stops. "The more fear officers feel, the more aggressive they become."
But no degree of fright, he said, explained the approach of some officers, who often threatened or used deadly force in response to mere defiance.
"The reaction sometimes seems to be, 'How dare you?'" Fredericks said. "'How dare you not do what you're told to do?'"
Officers have killed more than 5,000 civilians since Sept. 30, 2016, according to data on police killings collected by The Washington Post and the research groups Mapping Police Violence and Fatal Encounters.
Many died during felonies in progress, home invasions, domestic violence calls or shootouts in the streets. At least 1,500 were killed by officers pulling over suspected carjackers, during chases and at other types of vehicle stops.
From that data, the Times identified the more than 400 unarmed drivers and passengers who were not under pursuit for violent crimes. The Times examined video or audio from more than 180 of those encounters; interviewed dozens of chiefs, officers, trainers and prosecutors; submitted scores of open-records requests to obtain investigative files; and reviewed civil claims from more than 150 cases.
More than 75 of the drivers were suspected of car theft, either because of registration issues or stolen vehicle reports. Nearly 60 motorists were stopped for reckless driving, including many who turned out to be drunk or high. Others were pulled over for questioning about nonviolent offenses like shoplifting.
The police say there is no such thing as a routine stop; the driver's behavior can turn it into a high-risk encounter calling for drawn weapons and other measures. In the Times' review, motorists were often resistant or evasive. Some had been hiding illegal drugs or weapons; others had outstanding warrants for failing to pay a fine or missing a court date.
Among those killed, some became icons of the Black Lives Matter movement, including Daunte Wright, Rayshard Brooks, and Jordan Edwards. But relatives of many others also questioned whether race played a role in their deaths.
Kalfani Ture, a criminologist at Mount St. Mary's University in Maryland, said overstating the risks compounded racial bias.
"Police think, 'Vehicle stops are dangerous,' and, 'Black people are dangerous,' and the combination is volatile," said Ture, a former Georgia police officer who is Black.
LEGAL STANDARD
"Can you prosecute a police officer for a killing at a vehicle stop?" asked Gill, the district attorney in Utah. "Theoretically, you can. But practically, it becomes virtually impossible."
The legal standard, he said, "overwhelmingly errs on the side of sheltering police misconduct."
Although protests since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year appear to have spurred a modest uptick in criminal charges against officers, the police continue to claim special allowances for the use of force at vehicle stops.
In the more than 400 killings of unarmed drivers, the Times identified charges brought against officers in 32 cases. Among the five officers who were convicted, one got probation, another served seven months, one is awaiting sentencing, and a fourth will soon have his appeal heard by the Texas Supreme Court.
The fifth conviction was in the killing of George Floyd, who had been pulled from a car on suspicion of passing a fake $20 bill at a Minneapolis convenience store.
Nearly two dozen criminal cases are pending.
In more than 150 formal statements or public comments declining to bring charges, some prosecutors emphasized that legal standards tied their hands, regardless of whether a killing was avoidable. Many others focused on the faults of the drivers, such as their criminal records or drug use.
Claiming to fear for their lives "is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the police," said Sheila Albers, a former middle school principal in Overland Park, Kan., whose 17-year-old son, John Albers, was killed by an officer.
After friends reported John Albers as a suicide risk, officers found him backing the family minivan out of the driveway, and one fired more than a dozen shots into the vehicle. Prosecutors accepted the officer's explanation that the boy had driven "in an extremely aggressive manner."
But exhibits submitted in a wrongful death lawsuit indicated that the minivan had been moving at about 3 mph and that the officer was not in its path when he started shooting. The city paid the family $2.3 million to settle.