Agustin Gonsalez was shot dead by police officers in Hayward, California, in 2018 when he refused to drop a sharp object during a confrontation on a darkened street.
Andrew Moppin-Buckskin was killed in 2007 by Oakland officers after he ran away from a car chase, hid under a vehicle, and failed to comply with their demands.
Two years ago, Mario Gonzalez died after being pinned to the ground by officers in Alameda, California, for more than five minutes.
In all three cases, prosecutors ruled that police should not be prosecuted, seemingly closing the book.
But shortly after becoming Alameda County District Attorney in January, Pamela Price launched another review of those cases and five others in one of the most comprehensive re-examinations of police killings launched by progressive prosecutors.
Ms Price’s review is notable because her predecessors had already cleared the officers of wrongdoing and two of the reopened cases happened more than 15 years ago.
As high-profile cases of police brutality in recent years shocked the public and raised questions about official law enforcement accounts, liberal prosecutors campaigned on promises to review cases they believed were hastily closed without charges. Their efforts to revisit old cases were praised by the activists and liberal Democrats who voted for them.
But the re-investigations have so far rarely led to criminal charges.
“Reopening a case about police use of force is a huge task in many ways,” said Steve Descano, the Commonwealth attorney in Fairfax County, Virginia. the shooting of a man fleeing a car crash, a case the Justice Department previously reviewed and refused to pursue.
The incidents almost never have evidence as strong as the bystander video showing George Floyd being pinned to the ground for more than nine minutes in 2020 by Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer convicted of the murder of Mr. Floyd.
The circumstances are often more ambiguous, the images less revealing. And once a prosecutor writes a lengthy memo outlining why criminal charges against a police officer are unfounded, it can be difficult for a successor to refute those arguments in the absence of new evidence.
“Everyone will go through it again, and the outcome will most likely be the same,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “And what is Einstein’s definition of insanity?”
The biggest hurdle to pursuing criminal charges is the wide latitude officers have to use force. State legislators, including California’s, have tried to limit that ability. But officers can still generally use deadly force if they believe they or others could be killed, a level of immunity law enforcement officials say is necessary to ensure public safety.
Alameda County, Ms. Price’s jurisdiction, occupies a large swath of the East Bay across from San Francisco, containing 14 cities and numerous police departments. In the county seat of Oakland, where the Black Panther Party emerged in the 1960s, a legacy of radical politics is intertwined with a checkered law enforcement history. The Oakland Police Department is under fire federal supervision for more than two decades.
Ms Price campaigned on a Liberal platform which, in addition to reviewing old cases, included removing local residents from death row and sentencing prisoners serving life sentences – an attempt, she said, to build public trust to recover. Since taking office, she has instructed her staff to seek the lowest possible prison sentence for most crimes.
She said that in the past prosecutors routinely gave officers a free pass if they killed someone on the job, and she wants questionable police killings to be met with the same rigor as other criminal cases.
“Every case we’re looking at now had double standards,” Ms Price said in an interview. “Police officers received a different legal standard than ordinary people.”
Ms. Price is among a growing number of progressive prosecutors elected in the past decade, beginning with the 2016 elections of Kim Foxx in Chicago and Kimberly Gardner in St. Louis in 2016, on pledges to reduce prisons and police to be held accountable. The movement gained momentum after Floyd’s murder.
Some prominent prosecutors have since faced a backlash over crime concerns. Chesa Boudin was recalled to San Francisco last year, while Ms. Gardner resigned last week after facing criticism for her approach to violent crime. Ms. Foxx is not running for re-election next year and has faced criticism from moderates and conservatives, especially for her support for abolishing cash bail statewide.
In Maine, no police officer has ever been prosecuted for an on-duty homicide. But in July 2020, Natasha Irving, the district attorney for four counties, said she would file charges for the 2007 police kill of Gregori Jackson, who was drunk and ran away from a routine traffic stop in Waldoboro, the town where Mrs. Irving grew up.
Three years later, however, Ms. Irving said that, based on the Attorney General’s review of the forensic investigation of the case, she will not press charges.
“It’s just not going to be a provable case,” she said in an interview.
In the Virginia case brought by Mr. Descano was prosecuted, Bijan Ghaisar, 25, was involved in a minor car accident and then fled in his jeep, chased by two officers that Mr. Ghaisar cornered in a residential area. As the vehicle headed toward a police car, they opened fire, killing him.
Mr Descano filed a suit, but a judge dismissed the charges, ruling that the officers had reasonable grounds to fear they were in danger. His efforts to pursue the case were rejected by the state’s attorney general and the Justice.
Such assessments offer the possibility of justice for still-grieving families, but can also unrealistically raise their hopes. Karla Gonsalez, the mother of Mr. Gonsalez, the man who was killed in Hayward, said she was torn when she learned that Ms. Price was reopening her son’s case.
Television stations began replaying the body camera footage of Mr. Gonsalez’s confrontation with police. For his family, all the anger, sadness and unresolved questions came back. Why hadn’t the officers tried to de-escalate the situation?
“I was excited to know it was going to reopen,” Ms. Gonsalez said. “At the same time, I was very nervous that it would be another roadblock, another failure.”
According to Philip M. Stinson, professor of criminal justice at Bowling Green State University, less than 2 percent of police killings lead to charges. That figure has not decreased since 2020. The number of people killed by police remains stable — it was 1,200 last year, compared to 1,147 in 2022, according to Mapping Police Violence.
“From where I sit nothing has changed,” said Mr. Stinson.
In Los Angeles County, George Gascón, who was elected district attorney in 2020, appointed a special prosecutor to reopen four cases in which his predecessor, Jackie Lacey, refused to press charges. He also asked an independent team of experts to review more than 300 previous cases of use of force to see if the evidence warranted criminal charges.
Special Prosecutor Lawrence Middleton was convicted in a 1993 federal trial of Los Angeles Police Department officers for beating Rodney King. In the new cases, he brought charges against two officers in the 2018 shooting of Christopher Deandre Mitchell, who was driving a stolen vehicle and had an air rifle between his legs when confronted by officers in a supermarket parking lot. “The use of deadly force by both officers was reasonable in the circumstances,” Ms Lacey wrote in a 2019 statement memo.)
The re-examinations themselves take time, and liberal prosecutors can still bring criminal charges against more officers in previous cases. But they said cost shouldn’t be the only yardstick for determining whether their reviews are worth it.
“I think there’s tremendous value in reopening a case when there’s probable cause, or evidence that seems compelling in any way,” said Ms. Irving, the Maine prosecutor. “Yes, part of it is to send a message to people who would be bad actors. Part of it is sending a message to families who have lost loved ones, or individuals who have been harmed, that they count.”
Ed Obayashi, a California-based expert in the use of force who trains law enforcement, said in 2021 that Mario Gonzalez did not appear to pose a threat to the public in Alameda and questioned why officers restrained him before he died. Police had responded to a call that Mr. Gonzalez, 26, was acting strangely in a park and talking to himself.
Mr. Obayashi said this week that he did not blame Ms. Price for reviewing the case, but he also felt that if there had been consensus in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office under her predecessor, Ms. Price should not have reopened the case.
“It’s a big concern for law enforcement because this kind of decision, to revisit old cases where former prosecutors have decided no charges should be brought against the officer, it’s political,” Mr Obayashi said. “It’s politically driven.”
Ms. Price’s record also includes two cases from 15 years ago that occurred seven months apart in which the same officer killed men who ran after traffic stopped, including Mr. Moppin-Buckskin. The officer, Hector Jimenez, was acquitted in both counts and remains with the Oakland Police Department.
“For the life of me, I can’t understand what Ms. Price thinks she’s doing with cases like that some 15 years after they occurred,” said Michael Rains, a lawyer for Mr. Jimenez.
In Hayward, the city agreed to pay $3.3 million to settle a federal lawsuit involving Agustin Gonsalez’s family, but said it was a way to support his children rather than an admission of wrongdoing. The city said in April there appeared to be no new evidence to warrant reopening the case.
Mr Gonsalez was shot in November 2018 after police officers approached him. He was suicidal and had a razor blade in his hand. He refused to drop the knife and approached the officers with outstretched arms. Then the two experienced police officers shot him 12 times.
Sitting in her sister’s kitchen recently, Karla Gonsalez described her son as a father of two who was an Oakland sports fan and often drove nearly 400 miles to Disneyland on his season pass. In the corner of her living room was a makeshift shrine, with a flickering candle and a crucifix draped over his portrait.
Cynthia Nunes, Mr Gonsalez’s cousin, said her family was grateful his case was reopened. But they want more.
“The charges should actually be brought forward as well,” she said. “The system has to change.”
Julie Bosman contributed reporting from Chicago.