Before anyone builds a shrine, Mubarak Soulemane is no one’s hero. Yet, the New York Times headline is the sort of deliberately inflammatory racial pandering that lights the fuse on mostly peaceful protests.

White Connecticut Trooper Charged in Killing of Black Man During Stolen Car Chase

It’s not that it’s inaccurate, but that there is nothing involved to suggest that race had anything to do with it, not that you would know that from the way the article was structured, the third paragraph, before providing any factual information about what happened, leads with this sentence.

Police shootings involving white officers and Black drivers — the death of Patrick Lyoya, a Michigan man killed this month by a police officer, was a recent one — have raised questions about the use of lethal force during routine traffic stops and after chases.

Was this another a routine traffic stop? When we finally get to the facts, we get an answer, after a brief digression to note that the shooting came “at the end of a spell of paranoid behavior.”

About 4:15 p.m., Mr. Soulemane walked into an AT&T store in Norwalk carrying a kitchen knife before attempting to steal an iPhone 11. A manager grabbed the phone, and Mr. Soulemane rushed out of the store. Mr. Soulemane approached Daniel Green, a Lyft driver whom Mr. Soulemane had called to pick him up from the store, and urged Mr. Green to drive.

Mr. Soulemane then slapped Mr. Green, who promptly pulled into a gas station and motioned to the officers. As he did, Mr. Soulemane moved into the driver’s seat of the Hyundai Sonata. An officer ran up to the car and tried to open the door, but Mr. Soulemane pulled away.

At 5:04 p.m., Mr. Soulemane left the interstate and crashed into another vehicle. Mr. North and two other state troopers drove up and boxed in the Sonata, according to the report.

Soulemane had a knife in his hand, as an officer smashed the passenger window and another trooper used his Taser to no effect. Soulemane moved his arm upward, pointing the knife to the roof of the car.

Mr. North fired his gun seven times, then yelled, “Drop the knife!”

The report of the inspector general cited three “expert” reports, two obtained by the state’s attorney and one by Soulemane’s family. Both of the state’s reports opined that the use of force was reasonable in response to an imminent threat of deadly force. The third expert report by Cheryl Dorsey, a retired 20-year veteran of LAPD, disagreed.

Mr. Soulemane was seated inside his vehicle, completely contained, with the driver’s
side window up and door closed, at the time Trooper North fired seven shots into the driver’s side window fatally wounding Mr. Soulemane.

At the time the shots were fired, there was no immediate defense of life (the officer or
others) as Mr. Soulemane did not have the ability to harm any of the officers within close
proximity to his vehicle.

Officers are trained to use deadly force as a last resort and only after all other alternatives have been exhausted; including de-escalation techniques. The tactics used, leading to this fatal officer involved shooting, were contradictory to training and actions which a reasonable officer would deploy.

The inspector general’s evaluation of these experts concluded that the two state attorney’s experts conclusions were unreliable.

Both uncritically accept North’s statement as an accurate description of his actual belief with respect to the need to use deadly force.

More specifically, Taylor and Borden both failed to address (1) the fact that neither Jackson nor Rappa actually entered any portion of the car, and (2) that there were obvious reasons (known to North) why they did not do so. Such reasons included: (1) the passenger door was locked, (2) the Taser did not disable Soulemane, (3) the only access point was through a broken out window, (4) Soulemane had a knife, and (5) entering the vehicle would have been unsafe for either officer. Other than baldly asserting that North’s stated beliefs were reasonable, neither expert makes any attempt to explain why that belief would be shared by a reasonable officer; when, on these facts, it is patently unreasonable to believe that Rappa had entered the vehicle through the window simply because his head momentarily dipped below the car’s roofline.

Based upon this investigation, North was indicted for manslaughter in the first degree.

In the past, there would be almost no chance that the shooting and killing of Mubarak Soulemane would have been subject to serious investigation, no less a critical report and indictment. Soulemane was not a good dude, and having a knife alone would have been more than sufficient to justify the fatal shooting as he threatened the use of deadly force.

But as Dorsey correctly notes, Soulemane didn’t. As bad as he might have been, he was contained in the car and presented no threat to anyone. What caused North to shoot is unclear. Was he unreasonably scared such that he fired prematurely? Was he itching for a shooting? Did Soulemane’s race play any role in his decision to fire, such that he held Soulemane’s life in lesser regard than he would have a white person’s?

“No trooper ever intends to take the life of someone else; we don’t have the desire to,” said Andrew Matthews, executive director of the Connecticut State Police Union, at a news conference Wednesday. “And I don’t think — we don’t think that was the intent in this case,” he said, adding that “Trooper North made a split-second decision during some very unusual and very difficult circumstances.”

Whether that’s true or just the routine statement of a police union director is irrelevant. This indictment would almost certainly not have happened five years ago. Mubarak Soulemane may not have been a good guy, and he may well have been a bad dude, but there was no need to shoot and kill him. Whether it was manslaughter is a matter to be tried, but even bad dudes get to not be killed if there is no lawful justification to do so.