One-eighth of the tiny East Pittsburgh Police Department is now facing murder charges for killing an unarmed black teenager.
Officer Michael Rosfeld was indicted Wednesday morning for criminal homicide in the June 19th killing of 17-year-old Antwon Rose Jr., who was shot in the back three times as he ran from a vehicle.
Rosfeld has told investigators he could tell Rose did not have a weapon when the teenager began to run away from the car, Allegheny County District Attorney Stephen Zappala said during a press briefing Wednesday. The “criminal homicide” indictment allows prosecutors to put all the evidence before a jury and let those citizens decide if Rosfeld should be found guilty of first, second, or third degree murder, or voluntary or involuntary manslaughter. Zappala said the evidence gathered by his office and investigators from the Allegheny County Police Department would certainly be enough to prove third-degree murder, but that he believes the courts should let jurors consider a life sentence for first-degree murder in the case as well.
“It’s an intentional act, and it’s done recklessly, and there’s no justification for it,” he said, in a briefing carried live by local news stations. “You do not shoot somebody in the back as they are running away.”
Police officers may not use deadly force simply to stop someone from fleeing if they do not pose an “imminent threat” — at least in theory. Though the Supreme Court believes it has drawn that line as brightly and clearly as it can for more than three decades, officers have still routinely escaped criminal accountability for using guns to stop someone’s flight.
The problem, police shootings expert Philip Stinson from Bowling Green State University said, is that even though the law says jurors and judges must measure a killer cop’s conduct against what an objectively reasonable policeman would have done, when the time comes no one is willing to second-guess the shooter.
“Whatever the prosecutor does to try to bring up experts, or other officers who might say ‘I didn’t think there was a threat,’ the second that officer takes the stand and says I thought there was a threat the judge and jury say, ‘that’s it,'” Stinson said. “If they thought there was a threat but a reasonable officer wouldn’t have, that’s not good enough [for an acquittal]. But that’s very hard to prove at trial.”
Rosfeld and colleagues from the eight-officer agency were acting on a “mutual aid agreement” between six of the more than 100 separate local law enforcement agencies that operate in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania when they pulled over a car in which Rose was riding. It was the suspect vehicle in a drive-by shooting minutes earlier in neighboring North Braddock, PA. The passenger who fired those shots, Zaijuan Hester, is now in police custody. Rose never fired a gun, and police believe the man driving the car had been hired through Uber or a similar ride-sharing app, Zappala said Wednesday.
“By all accounts, Mr. Rose never did anything in furtherance of any crimes in North Braddock,” Zappala said. “There was no weapon that would have created a risk to Officer Rosfeld. Based on the evidence, I find that Officer Rosfeld’s actions were intentional, and they certainly brought about the result he sought to accomplish.”
All three shots Rosfeld fired struck Rose, one through the head and another, fatally, in the center of his back. Bystander cell phone video does not record Rosfeld giving any verbal warning to Rose or Hester as they attempted to flee. Zappala noted that it was, at best, odd for an officer to choose to start getting three people out of a car without waiting for backup.
The mutual-aid deal that led East Pittsburgh Police Department (EPPD) officers to help North Braddock police after the drive-by that evening may sound bucolic and neighborly. But the prevalence of tiny police forces jigsawed together in the area almost certainly helps generate worse law enforcement outcomes there, in similar fashion to the fractured policing maps of St. Louis and the Twin Cities that drew critical scrutiny after the killings of Michael Brown and Philando Castile.
“It causes problems. You’ve got state-wide training which is not always the same rigor you’d find in a specific police academy,” Stinson said, as well as the potential for “pissing matches” and jurisdictional squabbles that don’t serve the public well.
The professionalism citizens expect from their police in modern times just isn’t there in a department so tiny that it’s barely treading water. When Allegheny County officers arrived at the scene where Rosfeld killed Rose, they asked what EPPD policy was on handling an on-duty shooting scene.
“They said, ‘we don’t have policies,'” Zappala said, “for anything, as far as we know.” Asked if that lack of standardization and professional rules and procedures could make East Pittsburgh liable in the killing, Zappala said there was no criminal culpability on the city or department here but that “they’ve got a lot of answering to do” in civil court.
A larger department brings economies of scale beyond just the professionalization and standardization of policies and training, too. If a cop has been identified as a bad egg, a big department can look to force him off the job without worrying about denting its capacity to fulfill its responsibilities. A tiny force might be more reluctant to take responsible personnel actions when there are so few others to pick up the slack.
“Problem officers can shuffle from agency to agency,” said Stinson, when there are so many abutting and overlapping departments in an area that could just as well be served by one larger force. “That may or may not be the case with this guy.”
Rosfeld was reportedly caught misrepresenting facts in a case report during his prior tenure with the University of Pittsburgh police. Zappala suggested Wednesday that Rosfeld’s past conduct in law enforcement work should have been a red flag, giving a terse “yes” to a reporter who asked if anything in the officer’s personnel file “gives you concern.”
The swift decision to bring charges was not influenced by ongoing mass protests in the Pittsburgh area over the killing, Zappala said, pointing to his decisions to charge two other police officers in similar shot-in-the-back-for-fleeing cases earlier in his 20-year tenure.
“The people own the criminal justice system,” Zappala said of the protests. “If they’ve got issues with it, I think they’ve got the right to express that.”
The D.A. has been heavily criticized in the past by local black activists, in particular over what they see as his role in shielding school resource officers at Woodland Hills High School from accountability in alleged abuse cases. Rose had been a student at Woodland Hills. He hoped to go to college to study law or chemical engineering, his mother told ABC News.
Rosfeld becomes the 87th state or local law enforcement officer charged with a homicide since 2005, according to Stinson’s best-in-class dataset on such cases. Just 32 of those officers have been convicted, he said, half by jury verdicts and half through plea bargains. Many of the convictions end up tied to lesser charges than the original homicide — and even in the cases of Betty Jo Shelby in Oklahoma and Jeronimo Yanez in Minnesota, jurors often feel as though they can’t find a cop guilty even if they want to.
Prosecutors are at least trying at a slightly higher rate in recent years, Stinson’s numbers show. From 2005 through 2013, officers were charged with homicides just 41 times out of thousands of shootings in his dataset. From 2014 to 2017, 44 such cases were filed — an almost exact doubling of the overall rate of police prosecution for on-duty killings.
The prevalence of cell phone video has made it harder for both police to bury a “bad shoot” in dishonest paperwork, Stinson said — and for prosecutors, who rely heavily on law enforcement both politically and professionally, to decline to charge one.
“Can you imagine the spin had there not been video? When I was a police officer, it was referred to as ‘creative report writing,'” Stinson said. “‘We’ll figure out why we arrested him before we get to the station, sarge, don’t worry.’ You make the facts fit the narrative you’ve got to prove.”