No Charges for Police Officers Who Shot Black Man Almost 50 Times

A grand jury has decided not to bring state criminal charges against Ohio police officers who fatally shot a 25-year-old Black man during a car and foot chase last summer.

Police in Akron attempted to pull Jayland Walker over for an alleged traffic violation the night of June 27, 2022. Walker did not stop, and officers in pursuit allege that they saw a flash of light come from the driver’s side of the car, which they believed to be the muzzle flash of a gun, according to their accounts of the encounter. 

Body camera footage shows officers pursuing Walker as he drove away from the scene; he  eventually jumped out of his car and ran. While he attempted to flee on foot, the eight officers on the scene said they thought he was moving to draw a gun. They subsequently fired a total of 94 bullets at him. 

Walker suffered 46 gunshot wounds and died on the scene. He was unarmed, although a gun was found in his car. The officers involved were put on paid leave during the investigation into the shooting but were ultimately brought back for administrative duty during a staffing shortage. The grand jury was seated last week to determine whether to indict any of the officers.

“The grand jury just a little while ago issued what is called a no bill, meaning that there will be no state criminal action, no charges at the state level,” Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told a press conference Monday.

Akron has been bracing for the grand jury’s decision, after Walker’s death sparked citywide protests last summer. Police used tear gas to disperse protesters outside the Akron Police Department headquarters and arrested about 50 people (most of those charges were dropped).

But many Ohio residents are furious—and not without cause: The barrage of stories of Black people, particularly young Black men, being killed feels relentless. And few of those victims seem to get justice. Just last week, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot twice in the head when he went to the wrong house to pick up his siblings. Yarl survived. Authorities have released the shooter, sparking widespread criticism. 

“We’ve seen it too many times. A routine traffic [stop] ends in death, and a family and community mourns the loss of a son,” Representative Emilia Strong Sykes, who represents the district Akron is in, said in a statement. “As this country and community reckons with another tragic death, we find ourselves yearning for a justice system that protects us all.”

Sykes said she will ask the Department of Justice to investigate the Akron Police Department’s practices. “The safety and security of our neighborhoods requires trust between the community and the law enforcement officers who have taken an oath to protect and serve, but this trust has been violated and must be rebuilt.”

Former President Donald Trump, who brings to the federal government two impeachments and a criminal indictment, is making reelection commitments, threatening further cuts to regulations—the sort that might allow corporations to get away with even more chaos beyond disasters like the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment and collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. He also plans to impose some sort of mandatory test on federal employees.

On Friday, Trump made the remarks on a video posted on Twitter. “I will require every federal employee to pass a new civil service test,” Trump began, saying the test will cover all facets of Trump’s vision of a “constitutional, limited government,” including due process, equal protection, free speech, religious liberty, federalism, and—in a matter that both figuratively and literally hits close to home—Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure.

“I know all about that at Mar-a-Lago, don’t I?” Trump posed, insinuating that criminal investigations into his potential illegal seizing of classified documents—no less any of the other inquiries he faces—are somehow unconstitutional.

Perhaps Trump is right: If they can go after him for taking classified documents, conducting various shady financial and tax-evading schemes, trying to pay hush money to someone he had an affair with, and attempting to overthrow an election, they can go after you too. (This could also be what laws are for.)

“We will put unelected bureaucrats back in their place,” Trump asserted, alluding to his plan to administer a test to the federal workforce to determine whether they will keep their jobs. The idea builds off calls he made last year promising to make “every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States.”

Beyond his desire to impose a political test on every government employee, Trump promised to restore the spirit of his previous administration, one that held “for every one new regulation, two old regulations must be eliminated”—and that he will ask Congress to permanently enshrine this rubric into law.

The legacy of such an administration has been all the more observable as of late. With regard to the more than 1,000 train derailments occurring every year, including the East Palestine disaster, Trump himself deregulated the railroad industry and weakened environmental protection agencies. Contrary to any promises of new jobs, the rail industry’s enabled-by-deregulation pursuit of precision-scheduled railroading has cut jobs and made trains less safe, all in service of corporate profits. In terms of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Trump himself opened the doors to its failure by leading a successful campaign to roll back Obama-era Dodd-Frank regulations.

If nothing else, it’s nice for Trump to be honest about what America can expect if he’s reelected: more train derailments, more risk for economic crash, and more authoritarian measures to seize control over the government.

Tennessee’s Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton is facing growing calls to resign amid reports he has lied to his constituents.

The Tennessee state legislature has been under increased national scrutiny since a school shooting in Nashville three weeks ago, when a shooter killed three children and three adults. Republicans, who have a supermajority trifecta in the state House, Senate, and governor’s office, have repeatedly rejected attempts to increase gun control measures.

Things took a turn for the worse when the House voted to expel two Democrats, both Black men, for allegedly violating chamber rules when they joined thousands of pro–gun control protesters in the Capitol building. One white Democrat who also joined the demonstration was not expelled. Both of the two expelled, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson, were ultimately reinstated by their district councils.

In the week since their reappointment, Sexton has come under fire after reporter Judd Legum learned the speaker secretly purchased a $600,000 house in Nashville, where he and his family live year-round. Nashville is not in the district Sexton represents.

But Sexton claims to live in a condo in Crossville, a city two hours from the state capital and within the boundaries of his district. And as Legum reported in his newsletter, Popular Information, Sexton has for years claimed daily reimbursements of about $313, which are paid by taxpayers and intended to pay for lodging for state representatives who reside 50 miles or more from Nashville.

Since then, calls for Sexton to step down have mounted rapidly. Thousands of people have signed an online petition for Sexton to resign. The petition, which was started by the Christian social justice group Faithful America, had nearly 19,000 signatures at the time of this writing. “Democracy, racial justice, and gun safety are under joint assault in Tennessee,” the petition said. “We call on Speaker Sexton to resign for his shameful and unlawful power grab.”

Officials from the Cumberland County and Putnam County Democratic Parties, both in the speaker’s district, have also called for him to resign. “Even if it’s determined Sexton merely violated the ‘spirit’ of the residency requirement, his absence from the district means he and his family don’t experience the consequences of his actions,” said Anna Quillen, chair of the Cumberland County Democratic Party, in a statement issued Friday.

She pointed out that schools in her county already receive some of the lowest state funding per student and are likely to receive even less due to a measure that Sexton backed. Sexton’s daughter reportedly goes to private school in Nashville, meaning that his family will never experience the effects of that legislation.

Over the weekend, Jones cited reports on MSNBC when calling out Sexton and other Republican legislators “who are not doing the people’s work, particularly when it comes to poor people and rural people.”

Team Ron DeSantis continues to demonize everyday Americans, this time targeting his own state’s residents. On Saturday, Christina Pushaw, rapid response director for the Florida governor and potential 2024 presidential candidate, celebrated the idea of people fleeing Florida and the measures DeSantis has supported with the explicit goal of making their lives worse.

In response to a headline that a majority of Florida LGBTQ parents are considering leaving the state in response to the repressive “Don’t Say Gay” bill, the DeSantis right hand had one simple reaction: Bye!

The actual study Pushaw was smugly responding to found that nearly one-quarter of LGBTQ Florida parents feared harassment, with parents of school-age children in public schools expressing the greatest concern for their safety. Over half of the parents surveyed have considered moving out of Florida, while 17 percent have already taken steps to do so.

Such a reaction illustrates why some donors have recently started to sour on Ron DeSantis’s political prospects. In tacking further and further right by pursuing repressive policy after repressive policy—and surrounding himself with people of the same persuasions—he displays how shockingly little he cares for millions of Americans. In pretending to be the more “reasonable” Trump, he appeals neither to actual Trump supporters, who would have no reason to vote for the second-rate version, nor to the rest of potential voters who are simply not interested in such radical, out-of-touch politics that treat millions of hardworking Americans like pawns at best and garbage at worst.

The Ivy League elitist and former Guantánamo Bay torture adviser has tried to prove his salt-of-the-earth bona fides by pursuing outrageous policies—like loosening gun safety regulation; leading crusades against students, teachers, and school libraries; banning people from hanging out with undocumented people (of whom there are nearly one million in Florida); and passing an extremist abortion ban. In doing so, DeSantis has in fact smeared millions of Americans and Floridians who disagree with and are even directly impacted by such radical policies.

And in Desantis’s continued employment of and allyship with fellow radicals like Pushaw, he shows no sign of any interest in representing most of America. As NBC News reported at the end of March, Republican kingmakers have started to cool on DeSantis, with some suggesting that he might actually want to sit out the election rather than potentially lose to Trump. According to that report, conservative donors have cited a range of reasons for their emerging belief that the Florida governor isn’t quite ready for prime time, including “bold stands” that haven’t paid off, the fumbling of big moments, and a team that’s been deemed to be “far behind the eight ball.”

On Monday, Jim Jordan brought held a Judiciary Committee hearing in Manhattan, where he and his fellow House Republicans attempted to paint New York City as a crime-ridden disaster.* However, they instead managed to remind Americans that loose gun laws and Republican leadership have led to high crime rates and unlawful schemes that ship guns from red states to blue ones.

Jordan’s New York City field trip was part of a larger effort among House Republicans to try to discredit Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who added a new historical footnote to the twice-impeached former President Donald Trump’s checkered record by making him the first president ever to be criminally indicted. Republicans on the select committee hoped their hearings would undercut Bragg by highlighting what they characterized as a supposed crime crisis happening on his watch. Jordan, the House Judiciary Committee chairman, staged this “field hearing” just steps away from Bragg’s office.

But not everything went off according to plan. During the hearing, Jim Kessler, the executive vice president for policy at the centrist think tank Third Way, testified about how safe New York City actually is, versus the safety of the home bases of some of the House Republicans leading the Bragg and New York smear campaign.

“New York City is safer than most of the states of the members sitting on the dais on the majority side. In 2020, for example, New York City’s murder rate was 18% below the national average for the entire United States,” Kessler began. “Mr. Chairman, Ohio’s murder rate was 59% higher than New York City’s.” He continued, listing other places with high crime rates relative to New York City—including Louisiana, Texas, South Carolina, Florida, Kentucky, North Carolina, Indiana, Arizona, and Alabama.

“A hearing about the ravages of crime could be in Alabama with its towering homicide rate and a mass killing that just happened yesterday, or Louisville, where five people were murdered in the blink of an eye at a downtown bank,” Kessler continued, referring to the weekend mass shooting at a sweet 16 birthday party and the Louisville, Kentucky, mass shooting last week. “Or the murder capital of California, which is not Los Angeles or San Francisco or Oakland, but in Speaker McCarthy’s district of Kern County with its county seat of Bakersfield. And it has been the murder capital of California for six years running.”

Kessler went on to mention the so-called “iron pipeline”—the trafficking of guns from states with looser gun regulations like Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina to places like New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island, which often have tighter gun laws. “Wouldn’t it be great if this hearing was about how illicit guns are trafficked to places like New York City, New York, Boston, Philly, Chicago and on and on, and how those guns terrorize the innocent people living in those places and elsewhere?” Kessler posed. “That’s the sort of thing Congress would do if it really cared about what was happening with regard to crime in New York City.”

“There are eight and a half million people living in New York City on this tiny plot of land. Bad things happen here, no doubt,” Kessler said. “But the miracle of New York City is how well this enormous chunk of humanity mostly gets along and suffers less crime than much of the nation.”

Kessler was later questioned in the hearing further about New York City’s relative safety versus places across the country, from Mississippi and Wyoming to Missouri and Ohio. Representative David Cicilline decided to be clever.

“In light of the testimony we just heard, what is the mechanism for the committee to transfer this hearing to Ohio, where the crime rate is significantly greater than here in New York?”

He added, “How do we move the venue so we can have a hearing in a city or state that has a serious crime, the state of Ohio?”

Jordan quickly dismissed the quip, saying it was not a proper “parliamentary inquiry.”

Further illustrating how much of a joke the whole charade is, Representative Matt Gaetz chimed in during his time to address these high crime rates in places beyond New York City. “To the extent that there is an impact on crime rates in major cities, I would suggest that that is exactly what you get with the ‘Soros-ization’ of the United States Justice system,” the Florida Republican said, echoing the sort of sweeping antisemitism even Republican leadership has embraced. (Remember folks: It’s only antisemitism if it’s Ilhan Omar talking about Israel’s treatment of Palestinians; it’s not if we’re saying rich Jewish people control society.)

* This post originally misstated the committee organizing the hearing.