Dallas-Fort Worth have police shootings in common, but prosecutions may be worlds apart
In Texas' Metroplex, a pair of similar police shootings have residents wondering if justice can be equally served.
FORT WORTH, Texas — What happened in two North Texas cities just 32 miles apart was unnerving: Two white police officers. Two black people fatally shot by those officers in their homes. One officer convicted of murder; the second now charged with murder.
But the shared threads between the
shooting last year of Botham Jean by former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger and the
shooting last weekend of Atatiana Jefferson by former Fort Worth police officer Aaron Dean may end there.
For community members and activists in Dallas and Fort Worth, major cities that together anchor what is known in the state as the Metroplex, the cases are emblematic of inequality for people of color in the criminal justice system.
And while Guyger, 31, was convicted and
sentenced earlier this month to 10 years in prison by a Dallas County jury, some in Fort Worth remain cautious over how prosecutors in Tarrant County will handle the murder charge against Dean, 34.
The Tarrant County
District Attorney's Office announced Friday that it intends to ask a grand jury for a murder indictment against Dean, saying in a statement, "We will prosecute this case to the fullest extent of the law."
But how the case played out in Dallas doesn't mean it will be the same in Fort Worth, said Albert Roberts, a local defense attorney.
"We're close in proximity," he said, "but light years apart."
Dallas and Fort Worth like to emphasize their differences. Dallas has its glitzy glass skyscrapers downtown, while Fort Worth is known for its "Cowtown" culture. A view of the cities as being two sides of the same coin extends to the district attorneys: John Creuzot in Dallas County and Sharen Wilson in Tarrant County.
Creuzot, who unseated the incumbent Republican district attorney last November, was
lauded for winning a murder conviction against Guyger for Jean's killing.
In contrast, Wilson's prosecution in the case of a black woman named Crystal Mason, who was sentenced in 2018 to five years in prison after
voting illegally, drew widespread criticism from across the country.
That conviction and other prosecutions by Wilson's office have ingrained perceptions by many in the black community, and some white residents, that the local justice system does not treat people of color the same.
A spokeswoman for Wilson's office declined a request for an interview.
Dean, who resigned from the Fort Worth Police Department two days after the shooting, is "probably going to get off for it," said Cory Gray, 34, a black resident of Fort Worth and pharmacy student. "Out here?
Back the Blue."
Do differences make a difference?
Pamela Young, a lead organizer of the Tarrant County Coalition for Community Oversight, a group advocating for stronger police oversight, considers Dallas "newly progressive" after Creuzot took over in January.
Creuzot, who is African American, ran on a platform of ending mass incarceration.
Wilson, who is white and Republican, was elected as Tarrant County's district attorney in 2014, making her the first woman to serve as its top prosecutor. She was re-elected in 2018 after a race that was the first in 12 years in which a Republican candidate had faced a serious general election challenger.
Wilson is regarded as a law enforcement advocate in a county that despite its demographic shift remains a GOP stronghold.
"You can count on one hand the number of officers who have been prosecuted," said Roberts, who worked in Wilson's office and also spent time in the Dallas County District Attorney's Office. Roberts, a Democrat, challenged Wilson in the 2018 election.
Many officers involved in shootings are cleared and never arrested, he said.
The Rev. Kyev Tatum, an activist and president of the Tarrant County chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, has
called for a federal investigation and monitoring of the Fort Worth Police Department. Tatum, a pastor at the New Mount Rose Baptist Church in Fort Worth, said he respects Wilson, "but sometimes political pressure will cause you to do the wrong thing when you want to do the right thing."
Tatum called Wilson a "fair-minded" person, and although he has disagreed with her on past issues, she "made the right choice" to pursue a murder indictment.
"I know she would not have filed murder charges if she didn't think she would win," he added.
Wilson's office faced backlash last year after a former justice of the peace, Russ Casey, who is white, received five years' probation after pleading guilty to forging signatures to get his name on an April ballot.
Wilson
told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that Mason and another woman,
Rosie Ortega, a Mexican national whom Wilson successfully prosecuted on voting fraud, declined plea deals. But in the eyes of her critics, plea deals are representative of the county's racist justice system.
Mason, who had previously been convicted of tax fraud, said she was unaware that she could not vote when she cast a provisional ballot in 2016 — a vote that ended up not being counted because her name was already purged from voter rolls. Mason is appealing her conviction.
In a statement last year, Wilson shot back that Mason's defenders were trying to politicize the case.
"No one has anything to fear from our office unless the person chooses to break the law,"
Wilson said.
Prosecutors wield great power in the process of bringing an officer to trial and determining what charges an officer will face.
Grand juries hand up the indictments, but their decisions are based on what evidence prosecutors present, how they present it and the charges they recommend. Like police arrests, prosecutions are vulnerable to racial bias and political influence.
Faith Johnson, the Dallas district attorney when Guyger killed Jean, asked a grand jury to indict the former police officer for manslaughter. Instead, a grand jury upgraded the charge to murder, which Creuzot, as a candidate running against Johnson, had said was the more appropriate charge. Johnson was the GOP incumbent and also African American.
"The grand jury came back and said, 'Based on what you presented and told us, it looks like murder,'" said Chris Jenks, director of the criminal clinic at Southern Methodist University's Dedman School of Law in Dallas.
In Dallas County, with more than 2.6 million residents, about 42 percent of the population is Latino, 24 percent is black, 30 percent is white and about 3 percent is Asian.
Akhi Johnson, a member of the Vera Institute for Justice's Reshaping Prosecution Project, said it is trying to draw attention to systemic racial disparities to help remove bias from prosecutions. As the country
grapples with mass incarceration, scrutiny has increased on prosecutions.
The Vera Institute wants prosecutors to take a broader view by examining over-policing, failure to take into account the contributions of systemic poverty and historic discrimination and racism, as well as how slavery relates to poverty.
"They should be conscious of that in decision-making and recognize who they are charging, what they are charging them with and what they are going to ultimately do with the case," Johnson said.
Jennifer Lynn Eberhardt, a professor at the department of psychology at Stanford University, has extensively studied racism in the criminal justice system, and her work has included examining the association of "criminality" with black people and the effect those perceptions have in policing and the courts.
That sort of association can be at play in police-involved shootings or cases of police brutality, and continue through the criminal justice process and decision-making by prosecutors, Johnson added.