The cases that broke
the algorithm.

Date

25 May 2020

Location

38th & Chicago, Minneapolis

Officer

Derek Chauvin (convicted, murder)

Method

Knee on neck, 9 min 29 sec

George Floyd was killed on a Minneapolis sidewalk after officer Derek Chauvin knelt on his neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds. Three other officers — Thomas Lane, J. Alexander Kueng, and Tou Thao — assisted in restraining Floyd or stood by. Bystander Darnella Frazier's video, recorded by the seventeen-year-old as Floyd repeatedly said "I can't breathe," is the only reason there was a prosecution. The Minneapolis Police Department's initial press release was titled "Man Dies After Medical Incident During Police Interaction" and made no mention of a knee, a chokehold, or restraint. Without Frazier's video, the official record would have closed there.

Chauvin was convicted of second-degree murder, third-degree murder, and second-degree manslaughter in April 2021. He was later convicted on federal civil-rights charges. The other three officers were also convicted federally. The killing triggered the largest civil-rights protest movement in U.S. history; an estimated 15-26 million Americans participated in protests in summer 2020. The Minneapolis PD's initial press release stands as the canonical example of how these incidents would have been reported in the absence of citizen documentation.

Date

13 Mar 2020 (~12:40 AM)

Location

Louisville, KY (apartment)

Operation

No-knock warrant · narcotics

Charged Officer

Brett Hankison (acquitted state, convicted federal)

Breonna Taylor was a twenty-six-year-old emergency-room technician killed in her sleep when Louisville Metro Police executed a midnight no-knock warrant on her apartment. The named target of the warrant was an ex-boyfriend, Jamarcus Glover, who was already in police custody at a different location at the time of the raid. Her current boyfriend Kenneth Walker, asleep with Taylor and licensed to carry, fired a warning shot at what he believed to be home invaders. Officers fired thirty-two rounds in response; Taylor was struck six times. The initial Louisville Metro PD incident report listed her injuries as "none." Walker was initially charged with attempted murder of a police officer; the charge was dropped after public outcry.

The warrant itself was based on what investigators later determined to be falsified probable cause — Detective Joshua Jaynes had attested in the affidavit that he had verified Glover received packages at Taylor's apartment, when in fact he had not. Jaynes was federally charged with falsifying the warrant; he was convicted in federal court in November 2024. None of the officers who fired at Taylor — Jonathan Mattingly, Myles Cosgrove, or Brett Hankison — were charged with her death. Hankison was convicted of federal civil-rights violations in November 2024, four years and eight months after the killing.

Date

17 Jul 2014

Location

Tompkinsville, Staten Island

Officer

Daniel Pantaleo (no indictment 2014; fired 2019)

Final Words

"I can't breathe" · 11 times

Eric Garner was approached by NYPD officers for allegedly selling loose cigarettes outside a Staten Island convenience store. After a brief verbal exchange in which Garner repeatedly stated, "Every time you see me, you want to mess with me," officer Daniel Pantaleo applied a chokehold — explicitly banned by NYPD policy since 1993 — and brought Garner to the ground while four other officers held him in prone restraint. Garner said "I can't breathe" eleven times before going limp. He was pronounced dead at a hospital one hour later. The bystander video, recorded by Ramsey Orta, captures the entire encounter.

A Staten Island grand jury declined to indict Pantaleo in December 2014. The decision triggered the second wave of Black Lives Matter protests (after Ferguson) and produced the "I can't breathe" slogan. The federal civil-rights investigation, opened in 2014, resulted in no charges; the DOJ closed it in 2019 without action. Pantaleo was fired by the NYPD in August 2019, five years after the killing, following an internal disciplinary trial. Ramsey Orta, the bystander who filmed the encounter, was repeatedly arrested in the years following the video's release on charges his attorneys characterized as retaliatory. He served four years in prison.

Date

9 Aug 2014

Location

Canfield Drive, Ferguson

Officer

Darren Wilson (no indictment)

Federal Finding

DOJ pattern-or-practice report on Ferguson PD 2015

Michael Brown was shot six times by Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Canfield Drive following a brief encounter that began with Wilson stopping Brown for jaywalking. The grand jury declined to indict Wilson in November 2014. The DOJ federal civil-rights investigation cleared Wilson in March 2015 of any prosecutable federal violation, finding that the physical evidence did not support the "hands up, don't shoot" account given by some early witnesses. Simultaneously, the DOJ's separate pattern-or-practice investigation of the Ferguson Police Department itself produced one of the most damning federal civil-rights reports in U.S. history — documenting a department that operated as a revenue-generation arm of the city government, with explicit racial-targeting practices and systematic constitutional violations.

The dispute on Brown's specific killing is genuine — the physical evidence and DNA do not entirely match the early protest narrative. The Ferguson uprising that followed was not, however, primarily about the disputed facts of the shooting itself; it was about the documented decade of practices the DOJ report later confirmed. Brown's body was left in the street for four hours after he was killed — a detail that, beyond any question of the shooting's legal merits, shaped the public reaction and is itself part of the institutional record.

Date

7 Jan 2023 (died 10 Jan)

Location

Memphis · "Scorpion" unit traffic stop

Unit

MPD SCORPION (disbanded post-killing)

Charged

5 officers · murder + civil rights

Tyre Nichols was beaten to death by five Memphis Police Department officers — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr., and Justin Smith — assigned to the department's "SCORPION" anti-crime unit, following a traffic stop. He was twenty-nine, a FedEx employee, an amateur photographer, and a father. Body-camera and pole-camera footage, released by MPD ten days after the killing, showed officers pulling Nichols from his car, deploying pepper spray and a Taser, then chasing, restraining, and beating him over a roughly three-minute interval. The official MPD initial report described "two altercations" and a "use of force during the apprehension" — language that did not convey what the released footage showed.

The five officers were fired and charged within twenty days — an institutional response substantially faster than the typical timeline. All five were charged with second-degree murder; the federal indictment for civil-rights violations followed. The SCORPION unit was disbanded. The killing reignited the policing-reform conversation that had cooled since the immediate post-Floyd period. The pattern visible in the footage — officers acting in concert without intervention from any single party — is the structural feature shared with the Floyd case and is what places this entry on the file.

Date

22 Nov 2014

Location

Cudell Recreation Center, Cleveland

Officer

Timothy Loehmann (no indictment)

Time to Shoot

~2 seconds after car stop

Tamir Rice was twelve years old, playing in a park with a toy airsoft pellet gun, when Cleveland police officer Timothy Loehmann shot him in the abdomen approximately two seconds after the police cruiser came to a stop. Surveillance footage from the recreation center captures the entire encounter. The 911 caller had specifically told the dispatcher that the gun was "probably fake" and that the person holding it was "probably a juvenile" — neither caveat was conveyed to the responding officers. Loehmann had been previously found unfit for duty by the Independence (Ohio) Police Department in a 2012 evaluation that described him as "weepy," "distracted," and unable to follow basic commands; this disqualification was not flagged when he applied to and was hired by Cleveland PD. A Cuyahoga County grand jury declined to indict Loehmann in December 2015. The DOJ closed its federal civil-rights investigation in 2020 without charges.

Date

5 Jul 2011 (died 10 Jul)

Location

Fullerton, CA bus depot

Officers

Manuel Ramos, Jay Cicinelli (acquitted)

Diagnosis

Schizophrenia · unhoused

Kelly Thomas was a thirty-seven-year-old man with schizophrenia, unhoused, beaten to death by Fullerton Police Department officers at a transit center after officers approached him about reported car break-ins. The encounter was captured on a security camera; police audio captured Officer Ramos saying to Thomas, "Now you see my fists? They are getting ready to fuck you up." The beating that followed lasted approximately ten minutes. Thomas's last words on the recording: "Dad, they're killing me, Dad, help me." His father, Ron Thomas, a retired Orange County deputy sheriff, became the central public advocate. Kelly Thomas died five days later from a combination of mechanical compression of the chest, cranial injuries, and acidosis. In January 2014 a jury acquitted Officers Ramos and Cicinelli of all charges, including involuntary manslaughter. A third officer, Joseph Wolfe, had charges dropped before trial.

Date

18 Jan 2016

Location

La Quinta Inn, Mesa, AZ

Officer

Philip Brailsford (acquitted)

Pension

$2,500/month medical retirement post-acquittal

Daniel Shaver was an unarmed pest-control worker shot to death in a La Quinta Inn hallway in Mesa, Arizona, by officer Philip Brailsford while crawling on the floor toward officers and weeping, complying with a series of contradictory commands. The body-camera footage, released after Brailsford's 2017 acquittal, shows Shaver — sober, prone, crying — being told by Sgt. Charles Langley to "do not fall down" while simultaneously being instructed to keep his hands above his head and crawl forward. When Shaver lowered his hand to pull up his shorts, Brailsford fired five shots. Brailsford's AR-15 had the words "You're fucked" engraved on its dust cover — admitted at trial as character evidence by the prosecution and ultimately not allowed to substantively reach the jury. Brailsford was acquitted of second-degree murder. Mesa PD subsequently rehired him for forty-two days specifically to qualify him for a medical pension on the grounds that the trial had given him PTSD; he receives roughly $2,500 per month for life as a result.

Date

6 Jul 2016

Location

Larpenteur Avenue traffic stop

Officer

Jeronimo Yanez (acquitted)

Permit

Castile was licensed to carry, disclosed at stop

Philando Castile was a thirty-two-year-old elementary-school cafeteria supervisor stopped for a broken brake light by St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez. Castile, who was licensed to carry a firearm and had disclosed this to Yanez during the encounter, reached for his wallet to provide his license — Yanez fired seven rounds into the car at point-blank range. Castile's girlfriend Diamond Reynolds, sitting in the passenger seat, livestreamed the immediate aftermath on Facebook; her four-year-old daughter was in the back seat. Castile died at the scene. Yanez was acquitted of all charges, including second-degree manslaughter, in June 2017 — the first Minnesota officer ever charged with an on-duty fatal shooting. The killing was repeatedly documented as having been driven by Yanez's specific bias against Castile's appearance; his radio transmissions described Castile as "matching the description" of a robbery suspect on the basis of "the wide-set nose."

Date

16 Mar 2014

Location

Sandia Foothills, Albuquerque

Officers

Keith Sandy, Dominique Perez (mistrial 2016)

DOJ Finding

Pattern-or-practice violation 2014

James Boyd was a thirty-eight-year-old unhoused man with documented schizophrenia, shot to death by Albuquerque Police Department officers in the Sandia foothills after a hours-long stand-off triggered by reports that he had been camping illegally. Helmet-camera footage shows Boyd, who had agreed to come down off the hillside and was reaching for his bag, being shot from approximately twenty feet away. Officer Keith Sandy is recorded earlier in the day saying he was going to "shoot him in the penis with a shotgun." The killing was the catalyzing incident in the DOJ's 2014 pattern-or-practice investigation of APD — which produced one of the most significant federal civil-rights findings of the era. The criminal trial of Sandy and Perez ended in mistrial in 2016; charges were not refiled.