Thursday has been a good day for police reform advocates who believe cops too often get away with using deadly force when they don’t need to. In Baltimore, an officer was convicted of assault for wounding an unarmed burglary suspect by shooting him in the groin after he’d already been incapacitated. Now comes word from Virginia that a Portsmouth officer has been convicted of voluntary manslaughter for killing an unarmed 18-year-old during a confrontation in a shopping center parking lot.
The now-fired Portsmouth officer, Stephen Rankin, approached William Chapman in April of last year while investigating a shoplifting incident at Walmart. Testifying during his trial, Rankin told the jury that he had placed Chapman on the hood of his patrol car before trying unsuccessfully to incapacitate him with a Taser. According to Rankin, Chapman, who was black, knocked the Taser out of his hand and came towards him “aggressively” while saying, “Shoot me, motherfucker, shoot me.” Rankin said he opened fire on Chapman because he believed Chapman was about to kill him. “I felt I needed to save my life,” he said.
According to the Guardian, which reported last year that Rankin had previously been barred from street patrol for almost three years for shooting another unarmed man, prosecutors pressed Rankin on why he resorted to deadly force instead of attempting to deescalate or regain control of the situation in some other way. From the Guardian:
Asked why he chose not to try to physically tackle Chapman, Rankin, a US navy veteran who was trained in mixed martial arts, said he “wouldn’t have been able to win an unarmed fight” against the 18-year-old. “This is as dangerous as things get out there,” he said of their confrontation.
Rankin was sentenced to 2.5 years in prison. According to the Guardian, “it remains unclear what, if anything, Chapman stole from the Walmart.”
