A police officer outside Ronald E. McNair Discovery Learning Academy after reports that a shooter entered the school, on August 20, 2013, in Decatur, Georgia. David Goldman/AP Photo
By Chip Brownlee, The Trace, November 21, 2023
Last week, during the pre-dawn hours of what would turn into a balmy Monday morning, police executed a search warrant on a home in Mobile, Alabama, looking for marijuana. The 18-year-old subject of the warrant wasn’t there, police said, but after bursting through the doors, officers from a SWAT team and a narcotics division shot and killed a 16-year-old boy, Randall Adjessom. They claim he was armed with a “laser-sighted pistol.”
The shooting in Alabama’s third-largest city was the 785th time this year that an on-duty police officer shot and killed a civilian in the U.S. — and the 21st in Alabama. Last year, there were at least 1,096 fatal shootings by police nationwide, the highest number on record, and one that has been growing each year since at least 2016, according to The Washington Post’s database. Public records indicate that dozens of others are shot by police and survive every year, though a precise tally is elusive.
America’s crisis of police violence is deeply rooted — but research shows that there are solutions. To understand them, we first have to examine the problem head-on.
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