[PilotMan]

Originally Posted by molson

A South Carolina officer was indicted today on murder charges for a shooting involving a black man. This one hasn't gotten as much coverage, of course, because it defeats the very popular narrative that this never happens.

It IS the exception. Indictments happen regularly for the prosecution in cases that don't involve the police, but rarely in cases that do.

It’s Incredibly Rare For A Grand Jury To Do What Ferguson’s Just Did | FiveThirtyEight

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. attorneys prosecuted 162,000 federal cases in 2010, the most recent year for which we have data. Grand juries declined to return an indictment in 11 of them..........

Cases involving police shootings, however, appear to be an exception. As my colleague Reuben Fischer-Baum has written, we don’t have good data on officer-involved killings. But newspaper accounts suggest, grand juries frequently decline to indict law-enforcement officials. A recent Houston Chronicle investigation found that “police have been nearly immune from criminal charges in shootings” in Houston and other large cities in recent years. In Harris County, Texas, for example, grand juries haven’t indicted a Houston police officer since 2004; in Dallas, grand juries reviewed 81 shootings between 2008 and 2012 and returned just one indictment. Separate research by Bowling Green State University criminologist Philip Stinson has found that officers are rarely charged in on-duty killings, although it didn’t look at grand jury indictments specifically.