The System That Lets White Killers of Black People Get Away with Murder & What You Need To Know to Help Make Change

The killing of Ahmaud Arbery is not an isolated incident. 

Ahmaud Arbery was lynched a few months ago. He was jogging in broad daylight through a mostly White neighborhood in Georgia when he was chased down by three White men, cornered, and shot to death. Their justification for killing Ahmaud is the same one that’s always been used to justify lynchings by White Americans -- they suspected him of an unconfirmed crime and took it upon themselves to distribute justice. Despite police arriving on the scene moments later, Ahmaud’s killers walked free for 74 days until national pressure forced the police department, reluctantly, into some level of accountability. 

This is the America we live in. And while people like to talk about all the progress we made over the years, when it comes to equality, two things have remained true -- When someone kills a Black person in America, the legal system takes that death less seriously. When that killer is White or has lighter skin, they are more likely to walk free.

• This was true in 1919 when Eugene Williams was killed by a White man on Lake Michigan after paddling his raft into “White territory.” Witnesses pointed out the killer but police refused to make an arrest, resulting in the Chicago Riots of 1919.
• This was true in 1955 when 14 year old Emmett Till was beaten, mutilated, shot, and then thrown into a river for supposedly offending a White woman. An all-White jury found the killers not-guilty and the next year the men, protected by double jeopardy laws, admitted that they violently murdered this young child.
• This was true in 2012 when George Zimmerman, against the orders of police, chased down and confronted an unarmed 17 years old kid named Trayvon Martin who he suspected of being up to no good and killed him. He claimed self defense and walked free after a jury found he acted within the law. 
• And this was true in 2020 for unarmed Ahmaud Arbery whose murderers chased him down, cornered him with guns brandished, and killed him in broad daylight while claiming self-defense for a death they initiated.

In all of these cases the killers walked away without repercussions -- a trend that aligns with the lack of justice served for the other 3446 recorded Black lynchings carried out by White people between 1882 and 1968. But these numbers are just the start. They don’t include the unrecorded deaths during that period or the deaths of people like Freddie Grey, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Breonna Taylor or the thousands of other Black people unjustly killed by police. I couldn't even finish this piece before another killing, George Floyd's, gripped the nation.

While some will argue that these are isolated events that don’t represent the state of America, I disagree. Instead, these events are just a few amongst thousands on a timeline showing that the killing of Black people without consequence for the killer is an outcome our system produces over and over again. Redesigning our criminal justice system should be one of our top priorities if we want to have any hope that all people will be treated fairly. 

So where do we start? 

The systemic inequities that failed to prevent Ahmaud Arbery's death or hold his killers accountable don't tell us everything that needs to change, but they do help us start looking in the right direction. Here are 4 Things that need to change for us to create a more equitable criminal justice system.

1. Laws Governing Police Officer Conduct and Procedures

The US lacks a strong system of national police accountability. While most countries have national policing systems, in the United States, every city, county, and state has different rules, policies and procedures for how policing should be done. This means that most police departments in America lack any real measure of accountability to ensure that they arrest and investigate crimes equally. That opens the system up for bias and corruption. We should ask ourselves:

1. Should there ever be a situation where a killing isn’t investigated? 
2. Should one’s race, relationships, wealth, or celebrity status offer them preferential treatment?
3. Should the fact that someone is or was a police officer mean they live by a lower standard of responsibility when it comes to using lethal force?

To me, the answer is no, but there are few mechanisms to force police departments into accountability. In the case of Ahmaud Arbery, we saw how these factors biased the system toward White killers and away from their Black victim. 

1. Police chose not to arrest the killers and the Police Chief chose not to open an investigation. 
2. Action was only taken months later when video of the killing was leaked to the public, causing national outrage. This trend corresponds with what our national criminal justice data would lead us to expect: White killers face fewer consequences when they kill Black people. 
3. Relationships and job descriptions seem to have biased the response of the criminal justice system. Gregory McMichael, who had previously worked as a police officer and investigator for the District Attorney’s office, was given a pass by the police department and District Attorney he used to work for. 

None of this corresponds with how an equitable justice system should function. It shouldn't take angry protests and national news coverage for law enforcement to arrest and try murderers. Those with personal ties to a killer shouldn’t be allowed to make decisions about whether that killer is arrested and investigated. But unfortunately, the current design of our policing system allows that to happen. 

We need to design a system of oversight that ensures bias doesn’t get in the way of justice. If we're going to retain structural elements from the existing system, we need to create greater transparency and accountability for police. To learn more about how you can help create a local police oversight system, see here and here. 

2. The Overwhelming Power of District Attorneys

Prosecutors are arguably the most powerful people in the criminal justice system. The District Attorney is the chief prosecutor for a city, county, or state and their job is to prosecute those who commit crimes. But they also have other powers that we need to understand. District Attorneys have the power to define whether someone will be seen as a potential criminal or not, what crime they will be prosecuted for, and whether they will be offered a deal to avoid a judge or jury ruling.

They hold the power of all three branches of government. The decisions they make have the ability, in many instances, to predetermine the outcomes of a case and they have almost zero functional checks on their power. 

The day Ahmaud Arbery was killed, it is reported, the Brunswick Judicial District Attorney blocked the investigation into Arbery’s killing in effect saying, “There are to be no arrests today.” This is disputed by the DA, but regardless of whether it's true or not, the real problem is that the system permits this kind of conduct. A system that gives one person the power to halt the entire criminal justice process and let killers walk free after murdering someone in broad daylight, is not a just system. And one that allows this to happen even when the person with that power has a close personal relationship to the offender would generally be considered corrupt. 

We need to create true checks and balances on the power of prosecutors to ensure everyone is treated equally. I cannot overstate how important this reform is. The first step to creating a system of oversight for prosecutors must be to raise awareness about just how important reform is for this position. From there, we need to either lobby state and federal officials to create new methods of oversight or organize grassroots efforts to create citizen-run accountability measures.

3. Media, Public, and Police Efforts to Destroy Black Character

White people with guns are often portrayed and viewed by our media, public, and police as "heroes" at best, or "misguided" defenders of their rights at worse. Black people, whether they have a gun or not, are often referred to as "thugs." This term is sometimes used for non-Black people, but not in the same way. For the Black community, this word is used to characterize people convicted of crimes, rioters, Black protesters, presidents, athletes, former athletes, and more. It is one of many descriptions that serves to lump Black people together into one group of dangerous, violent, criminals who have stepped out of line with White society. Applied in the context of Black death, this characterization and those like it are used to substantiate killings and cast doubt on the purity of Black victims. It creates a biased narrative that says, "If he's dead, he must have deserved it. There must have been good reason."

Days after the Ahmaud Arbery video was released I ended up in a series of twitter arguments with people who used different versions of this exact same logic to cast doubt on the purity of Ahmaud. 

Digging up disconnected things Ahmaud did in the past to cast doubt:

Casting doubt that he could possibly be doing something lawful and normal:

Implicitly portraying vigilante White killers as defenders of a free, civilized society while claiming Ahmaud was a thug:

This effort to destroy the image of Black victims is rampant and almost universally applied when the killing of a Black person at the hands of a White person gains national attention. This makes it easier to maintain a system where White killers are more likely to walk free. Black death is pre-justified in the minds of the public and can be taken less seriously by law enforcement. 

All of us who want equal treatment under the law need to recognize when this is happening and condemn it with the same certainty we would use to condemn a racist slur.

4. Stand Your Ground Laws

Stand Your Ground laws bias toward White people. A 2013 study found that homicides committed by White people against Black people were 10 times more likely to be ruled justified than cases where the shooter is Black and the victim is White, and the gap is larger in states with Stand Your Ground laws. As Associate Civil Rights Attorney Blerim Elmazi said when reviewing this article, “Any law that’s 10 times more likely to be ruled justified for one race over another is problematic and needs to be re-evaluated for its obvious bias.”

In Georgia and more than 30 other states, you have the right to “stand your ground,” killing another person without a second thought as long as you feel threatened. Given that:

1. White people are more likely to own a gun than Black people.
2. White people are more free to carry them openly without fear of being killed by police, and
3. You have to be alive for a stand your ground defense to work,

Stand your ground laws are biased toward White murders who successfully kill their victims.

At least twice in recent high profile instances, this law has been used as rationale for not arresting violent killers whose own aggressive actions initiated the encounter. George Zimmerman was originally not arrested after killing Trayvon Martin and Gregory and Travis McMichael were not arrested after killing Ahmaud Arbery. You should not be able to aggressively confront someone else in public such that they may fear for their own life, and then use the law to get away with murder when you successfully kill them first. 

This law should be intensely scrutinized and challenged by those interested in creating a more equitable system. To learn more about citizen referendums (only possible in some states), see here. If you can’t change laws by voter referendum, as is the case in most states with "Stand Your Ground" laws, you'll either need to lobby your elected officials or vote new people into office.

*****

While Ahmaud Arbery jogged down the streets of Satilla Shores, multiple calls went in to the police to report him, but it's unclear what specific crime they were calling about. One claims "He's in a house right now. It's a house under construction." But a confused dispatcher tries to understand what Ahmaud was doing wrong. The caller responds, "He's been caught on camera a bunch before," and the dispatcher says she'll send someone. The second call is equally inconclusive with the caller stating, "I'm out here at Satilla Shores. There's a Black male running down the street." As the operator tries to get more details you hear, "Stop...Damnit. Stop...Travis." A short time later, Ahmaud Arbery was dead.

Gregory McMichael later claimed he suspected Ahmaud was armed and had burglarized a home. But after killing him, found no gun nor stolen items. None of this seemed to matter though. He and his son were free to go and would have remained free if video of Ahmaud's death hadn't leaked online.

I personally have little doubt that if Ahmaud were White, he would still be alive. And, I have no doubt that if the races of the people involved in this altercation were flipped, and Black men had pursued a 25 year old White man out for a jog, regardless of what they suspected him of, cornered him, and then killed him, they would either be in jail or dead. 

My goal is to work with good people of all races to keep what is good in our social systems and fix what is broken so that all of us can thrive. I believe from the depths of my soul that doing so is possible. But to make that happen, we need to see our systems as they really are. We must also see the way race plays a role in the outcomes these systems produce. It is not enough to be colorblind if we want to make the world a better place. We must see racial injustice for what it is, understand why it exists, and commit to working together until it is fixed. Until we do, the violence, riots, and social unrest that comes from unequal treatment will continue to consume our country.

Let’s work together to redesign the system so it works well for everyone. Only then can a Black man on a jog expect to make it home.

*****

Want to connect? Want to partner? Want to see more content on how we can improve our world? Website: www.dcdesignltd.com | IG:@durellcoleman | Twitter: @_durellcoleman_

Durell Coleman is the founder and CEO of DC Design, a social impact strategy & design consultancy that partners with social sector organizations to reduce systemic inequality and design new ways for people to thrive. He has worked with governments, foundations, & nonprofits to develop new approaches to criminal justice reform, redesign aspects of the foster care system, reimagine healthcare service models, create apps that connect communities, and develop new educational models for the 21st century. He frequently teaches about social impact design, innovation, design thinking, and leadership at Stanford University. For his work, he has been awarded the Jefferson Award for Public Service. His efforts in life are powered by a deep belief in the inherent value and purpose of every human life.