Mar 22, 2019 3 min read

Years ago, when there was an incident of alleged police brutality or the shooting of a person by a police officer, it was often a case of the alleged victim’s word against that of the officer. In a best-case scenario, there might have been witnesses who could provide their view of the incident in question.

Today, millions of Americans have high-quality video recorders (cellphones) in their pockets or purses, and many police officers are wearing body cameras, meaning that disputed incidents involving police often can be viewed as they happened.

Of course, any such incident is rarely without nuance. There are circumstances involved that even the best video can’t adequately relate.

Some cases are much more clear-cut than others. About four years ago in North Charleston, S.C., a black man named Walter Scott was pulled over because his car had a broken brake light. Scott ran from the traffic stop, and video taken by a witness clearly showed a white police officer, Michael Slager, shoot Scott multiple times in the back, killing him. The video made it clear that Scott posed no threat whatsoever to the officer, and Slager eventually pleaded guilty to federal charges of civil rights violations. He’s now serving a 20-year prison term.

We have our own similar-but-different case in this area now, with former East Pittsburgh police officer Michael Rosfeld, who is white, on trial in Pittsburgh for the shooting death of unarmed black teen Antwon Rose following a traffic stop last summer.

Rose was a passenger in a car that was suspected to have been used in a drive-by shooting. Rosfeld pulled over the vehicle, and as Rose and another passenger – the one who had actually done the shooting in the drive-by – ran from the vehicle, the officer pumped three bullets into Rose, fatally wounding him.

Subsequently investigation turned up a gun under the seat where Rose was sitting in the car, but he was not armed when shot by Rosfeld.

In his opening statement, as reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Rosfeld attorney Patrick Thomassey said actions by police officers must be judged by how the officers reacted to what they knew and saw at the time, not with 20/20 hindsight.

“You have to make, as a police officer, a split-second decision,” said Thomassey. “Are we searching for the truth, or are we just going to say, ‘It must be murder?'”

The prosecution, according to the P-G, asked jurors not to become mired in the details of the events preceding the shooting of Rose, meaning the earlier drive-by shooting.

“In the end, what really, really matters is what Michael Rosfeld knew, what he believed and what he thought when he pulled the trigger,” said Dan Fitzsimmons, Allegheny County chief trial deputy district attorney.

And the thing that Rosfeld clearly knew, regardless of anything else, is that the teenager was sprinting away from him when Rosfeld fired those shots. That’s the hard thing for the defense to explain away.

As we’ve noted before in cases such as this, police officers have an incredibly difficult, incredibly dangerous job to perform, and as in other professions, there are officers who are good at making high-stress, split-second decisions and those who are not. But in the case of police officers, mistakes, even if totally unintended, can be deadly, and in this case, it’s up to the jurors to decide whether Rosfeld’s actions that summer day were criminal.