(This is the first story in a three-part series investigating police officer-involved deaths in Montana.)
In the past two weeks, police officers in Montana have shot four men, killing three and hospitalizing a fourth. As state media outlets release more details about the individual incidents and aftermath, this reporter set out to determine just how many people have died in police custody across the state in recent years.
The goal was to identify every officer-involved death in Montana over the past five years, to make sure not a single instance slipped through the cracks. Unfortunately, the investigation affirmed what critics have long said: the scattershot approach state and federal officials take when it comes to tracking such deaths makes it next to impossible for journalists to build comprehensive reports featuring the level of certainty many readers might expect.
However, despite shortcomings detailed below, the investigation did yield some interesting findings. The most noteworthy? Of the nearly three-dozen deaths in custody in Montana over the past five years, not a single police officer who played a role in a civilian death appears to have been found criminally liable.
As protests against police brutality continue nationwide, many reporters have tried to answer a seemingly straightforward question: how many people die in police custody or while being pursued or arrested?
Most stumble immediately out of the blocks when they realize that, while the FBI and the Bureau of Justice Statistics have historically tracked such incidents, the data sets are incomplete because reporting has been voluntary—and that was before the BJS stopped keeping the records in 2009.
Finding numbers at the state level can be equally vexing. The Montana Board of Crime Control typically makes statewide “Deaths in Custody” reports, but the state process suffers some of the same limitations as the federal.
According to MBCC statistician Tyson McLean, reporting is voluntary. Short of requesting individual reports from every sheriff’s office and police department in the state and waiting however long it takes them to respond, there is no surefire way to vet the state reports for completeness.
President Obama signed the Death in Custody Reporting Act of 2013 (H.R. 1447) into law in December. Among other things, it mandates reporting and ties some local police department funding to those reports to help ensure compliance. But as the popular bill sailed through Congress, it also managed to disrupt what reporting was already taking place in Montana.
The MBCC stopped tracking incidents at the beginning of 2014 because it was anticipating rule changes related to the pending law. “The feds told us to stop collecting and wait until a new process was developed,” McLean wrote in an email.
The result? No centralized data for 2014.
After cross-referencing the MBCC reports with information from Department of Justice spokesman John Barnes, this reporter and an intern made several sweeps of the Internet using different search engines and combinations of key words to see if those reports omitted any incidents and to track down stories about officer-involved deaths in Montana in 2014.
The method was imperfect, but allowed for more timely reporting than would be possible identifying and querying every law enforcement office in the state.
Based on the sources detailed above, it appears law enforcement officers in Montana have played part in at least 36 civilian deaths since 2010.
John Warner
Click the image above to view a spreadsheet cataloging Montana’s deaths in custody for the years 2010 to 2014. It includes links to a couple news stories that covered each incident. Sources: Montana Board of Crime Control, Montana Department of Justice, web searches conducted by Big Sky Investigative Reporting. Readers can also access the PDF version.
Here are a few other noteworthy findings:
♦ All the people who died were men.
♦ Twenty-eight of those men were armed, while seven and possibly eight were unarmed (details are scarce in the most recent incident). Most of the weapons were guns. But one of the armed men was carrying a BB gun and another a knife.
♦ Thirteen of the deaths occurred in 2013 alone. There were at most six deaths in each of the other years examined.
♦ At least 12 incidents resulted in suicides, though in several other instances the victims did things that suggest they were probably suicidal. For instance, one of the men reportedly stuck a gun barrel in his mouth during negotiations with police. An officer eventually shot him.
♦Twelve of the incidents, or 33 percent, involved officers from the Billings Police Department and/or Yellowstone County Sheriff’s Office.
♦ Law enforcement officers located in Gallatin County and Lewis and Clark County were involved in four deaths each.
♦ Two people were killed by the Blackfeet Police Department during February and March of 2014.
♦ Two deaths involved Tasers.
♦ Two involved car crashes during police pursuit.
♦ One officer from the Billings Police Department, Grant Morrison, shot two unarmed men within 14 months. Coroners’ inquests found both instances to be justified. The most recent inquest just wrapped up on Wednesday.
♦ One Montana Highway Patrolman, Trooper David DeLaittre, died during one of the incidents. His killer was later found dead in his truck. The cause? A self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Another particularly notable finding was that, of all the outside investigations and coroners’ inquests that have taken place to date, not a single one has found an officer’s use of lethal force unjustified.
In cases that didn’t involve use of force—those involving suicides or car crashes—officers were always found not to be at fault.
In two cases when victims died in custody after officers used Tasers to subdue them, investigators determined that drugs present in their systems, not electricity, had killed them.
Some of the more recent investigations are still pending. However, the basic pattern shouldn’t be particularly surprising to anyone who reads the news. Several prominent national reports have shown how rare it is for grand juries or coroners’ juries to find homicides unjustifiable when police officers are involved.
The relative scarcity of indictments tends to spark competing interpretations, with some arguing it proves police officers usually make the right decision in the moment and others claiming it proves grand juries and inquests are fundamentally biased in favor of cops.
(The second story in this series will examine coroners’ inquests in Montana.)
Updated (1/8/2015, 11:43 p.m.): The evening this story was published, Yellowstone County Sheriff’s deputies shot and killed a man in Huntley. We edited details of the original article to reflect the change, but not the numbers appearing in the accompanying spreadsheet, which only covers the years 2010 to 2014. When the victim’s name is released, we will publish an additional spreadsheet that includes the most recent information.
This story has been republished under a Creative Commons license with mtvigilante.org, a project of the nonprofit Big Sky Investigative Reporting. You can see the original story here.
