Staff of The New York Times

Officers, trained to presume danger, have reacted with outsize aggression. For hundreds of unarmed drivers, the consequences have been fatal.

By David D. Kirkpatrick, Steve Eder, Kim Barker and Julie Tate

“Open the door now, you are going to get shot!” an officer in Rock Falls, Ill., shouted at Nathaniel Edwards after a car chase.

“Hands out the window now or you will be shot!” yelled a patrolman in Bakersfield, Calif., as Marvin Urbina wrestled with inflated airbags after a pursuit ended in a crash.

“I am going to shoot you — what part of that don’t you understand?” threatened an officer in Little Rock, Ark., adding a profanity, as she tried to pry James Hartsfield from his car.

The police officers who issued those warnings had stopped the motorists for common offenses: swerving across double yellow lines, speeding recklessly, carrying an open beer bottle. None of the men were armed. Yet within moments of pulling them over, officers fatally shot all three.

The deaths are among a series of seemingly avoidable killings across the United States. Over the past five years, a New York Times investigation found, police officers have killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife, or under pursuit for a violent crime — a rate of more than one a week.

Most of the officers did so with impunity. Only five have been convicted of crimes in those killings, according to a review of the publicly reported cases. Yet local governments paid at least $125 million to resolve about 40 wrongful-death lawsuits and other claims. Many stops began with common traffic violations like broken taillights or running a red light; relative to the population, Black drivers were overrepresented among those killed.

The recurrence of such cases and the rarity of convictions both follow from an overstatement, ingrained in court precedents and police culture, of the danger that vehicle stops pose to officers. Claiming a sense of mortal peril — whether genuine in the moment or only asserted later — has often shielded officers from accountability for using deadly force.

“We get into what I would call anticipatory killings,” said Sim Gill, the district attorney for Salt Lake County, Utah. “We can’t give carte blanche to that.”

In case after case, officers said they had feared for their lives. And in case after case, prosecutors declared the killings of unarmed motorists legally justifiable. But The Times reviewed video and audio recordings, prosecutor statements and court documents, finding patterns of questionable police conduct that went beyond recent high-profile deaths of unarmed drivers. Evidence often contradicted the accounts of law enforcement officers.

Dozens of encounters appeared to turn on what criminologists describe as officer-created jeopardy: Officers regularly — and unnecessarily — placed themselves in danger by standing in front of fleeing vehicles or reaching inside car windows, then fired their weapons in what they later said was self-defense. Frequently, officers also appeared to exaggerate the threat.

In many cases, local police officers, state troopers or sheriff’s deputies responded with outsize aggression to disrespect or disobedience — a driver talking back, revving an engine or refusing to get out of a car, what officers sometimes call “contempt of cop.”

In dashboard- and body-camera footage, officers could be seen shooting at cars driving away, or threatening deadly force in their first words to motorists, or surrounding sleeping drivers with a ring of gun barrels — then shooting them when, startled awake, they tried to take off. More than three-quarters of the unarmed motorists were killed while attempting to flee.

“We have got to take him out,” an Oklahoma state trooper declared over the radio in 2019 to patrolmen chasing a man in McAlester suspected of shoplifting a bottle of vodka. The officers used their cars to force his S.U.V. from the road, opened a door as it rolled slowly past and shot from both sides, killing the driver, dashcam footage shows.

A Tennessee sheriff ordered his deputies to fire at a motorist with a suspended license in 2017: “Don’t ram him, shoot him!” he later recounted saying, according to a body-camera recording. Knocking the man off the highway might “tear my cars up!”

Struggling to subdue a driver a few months later, a patrolman in Moundridge, Kan., warned that the man might be reaching for a police sidearm; an officer shot him, another struck his head with the butt of a shotgun and a third pummeled his body with a baton — killing him though he never touched a gun, video records show. And last year a body camera recorded an officer in Las Cruces, N.M., warning a motorist that he would “choke you out, bro,” then pinning him in a headlock. “A good little scrap,” the officer called it, before realizing the man had died.

Some families of the drivers said that their relatives were not blameless. “I don’t have my head buried in the sand,” said Deborah Lilly, whose 29-year-old son, Tyler Hays, had drugs in his car and tried to run away when he was pulled over for tinted windows last year by a sheriff’s deputy in Hamilton County, Tenn. “I am just saying he did not deserve to get shot in the back.” (Over the next three months, the deputy shot at two other unarmed drivers, wounding one.)

Almost all of the officers involved in these cases declined to comment or could not be reached. Advocates for the police argue that the dangers of stopping cars require readiness to use deadly force. “I have watched enough videos of an officer who is not on edge enough and his dashcam films his own death,” said Larry James, general counsel of the National Fraternal Order of Police. “What are you going to do? Are you going to be indicted, or are you going to be buried?”

Traffic stops are by far the most common police encounters with civilians, and officers have reason to be wary in their approach: They don’t know who is inside a car or whether there are weapons. Ten officers have been killed this year in such interactions, including a Chicago officer who was shot in August by a passenger during a traffic stop for an expired registration.

But some police chiefs and criminologists said that alarmist training about vehicle stops has made officers too quick to shoot at times, resulting in needless killings. Academies and commanding officers often rely on misleading statistics, gory cop-killing videos and simulated worst-case scenarios to instill hypervigilance. Many officers are trained to place a hand on the trunk of the car as they approach, to leave fingerprints as evidence if ambushed by the driver.

“All you’ve heard are horror stories about what could happen,” said Sarah Mooney, assistant police chief in West Palm Beach. “It is very difficult to try to train that out of somebody.”

The overemphasis on danger has fostered tolerance for police misconduct at vehicle stops, some argue.

“Prosecutors and courts give more leeway to officers’ decisions to use force at vehicle stops, as a result of the exaggerated concern about the potential for officers getting hurt,” said Michael Gennaco, a consultant to police departments on officer accountability and a former Justice Department prosecutor. “Officers would likely kill fewer drivers if there were deterrence.”

‘The Most Dangerous Thing’

Three sheriff’s deputies surrounded a beat-up Mercedes with a broken taillight in Clark County, Wash., in February. The tools strewn across the passenger seat worried them immediately, they later told investigators.

“That right there can hurt someone,” said Deputy Holly Troupe.

The driver’s retorts set off more alarms. “You need to chill out!” she recalled him parroting back to her.

To help force him out of the car, Deputy Sean Boyle punched the driver in the nose. Deputy Troupe grabbed him below the jaw in what she called “pain compliance.” But the driver, Jenoah Donald, a 30-year-old mechanic who had autism and struggled with drug addiction, started the car with one hand and clutched Deputy Boyle’s ballistic vest with the other, the officer later said.

Deputy Boyle, though he had 70 pounds on the driver, told investigators he had feared he might be stuck half-inside a moving car: “I was convinced, ‘This is how you are going to die,’” he later told investigators. So he shot Mr. Donald in the head.

Prosecutors questioned whether the stop would have ended differently if the officers had explained to the driver why they were ordering him to leave the car. But Deputy Boyle, with two decades on the job, had fired “in good faith,” the prosecutors concluded.

“I know from the academy that they tell you traffic stops and D.V.s” — domestic violence cases — “are the most dangerous thing we’ll do,” Deputy Troupe, a rookie, told investigators. “I thought, ‘This is why they tell us that.’”

Some officers involved in fatalities at vehicle stops cite their training, which for decades has stressed the perils of those interactions.

In many departments, police academy lessons and daily briefings include a steady diet of body-worn camera videos that depict easygoing officers being gunned down by drivers who whipped out overlooked firearms.

Seemingly every officer in America has watched the 1998 dashcam footage of Deputy Kyle Dinkheller’s murder on the Georgia roadside where he pulled over a veteran with a semiautomatic rifle in his pickup. Roll call briefings often feature fresher reminders, like the images of an officer shot in March outside a Nashville store by a driver who kept a handgun in her purse.

Trainers and tactical guides typically emphasize that vehicle stops account for more killings of officers than almost any other type of interaction.

Of the roughly 280 officers killed on duty since late 2016, about 60 died — mostly by gunfire — at the hands of motorists who had been pulled over, a Times analysis showed. (About 170 other officers died in accidents on the job.) But the assertions about the heightened danger ignore the context: Vehicle stops far outnumber every other kind of police dealings with civilians.

In fact, because the police pull over so many cars and trucks — tens of millions each year — an officer’s chances of being killed at any vehicle stop are less than 1 in 3.6 million, excluding accidents, two studies have shown. At stops for common traffic infractions, the odds are as low as 1 in 6.5 million, according to a 2019 study by Jordan Blair Woods, a law professor at the University of Arkansas.

“The risk is statistically negligible, but nonetheless it is existentially amplified,” said Mr. Gill, the Salt Lake County district attorney and an outspoken proponent of increased police accountability.

State laws generally prohibit police officers from using lethal force unless they reasonably believe it necessary to prevent imminent death or serious injury. Under pressure from street protests over the 2014 killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., and the more recent Black Lives Matter marches, many police departments have made de-escalation their watchword. They often advise officers to defuse conflict with motorists, for example by listening attentively instead of just barking orders.

“The last thing I need to try to do is exert my authority, like ‘You’re going to do what I tell you to do because I said so,’” said Jon Blum, a former police officer who now writes training materials for police agencies and the International Association of Chiefs of Police. “What the officer has to do is sell the person.”

Departments have increasingly instructed officers to let suspected lawbreakers drive away and find them later, avoiding the risks of potential confrontation or a high-speed pursuit. “You have the guy’s car license plate and you know where he lives,” said Scott Bieber, the chief of police in Walla Walla, Wash. “You go get him in 45 minutes at his house and add a charge of eluding.”

But some veteran officers say the emphasis on avoiding conflict can embolden criminals.

“I’ve actually heard people say, ‘You’re not supposed to chase me, you’re not supposed to pursue,’” said Sgt. Sanford Swanson Jr., a patrolman who is also an instructor for Pro Train, which has taught vehicle-stop tactics to trainers in 38 states. “Sometimes walking away can still pose dangers.”

A Line in the Sand

Genevive Dawes, a 21-year-old mother of two, was asleep with her boyfriend in a Dodge Journey outside a Dallas apartment building before dawn on Jan. 18, 2017.

Someone had reported a suspicious vehicle in the parking lot, and body-camera footage shows six police officers surrounding the car with bright lights and raised guns. “Hands up!” one shouted, video footage shows. “Show your hands! Don’t move!”

Ms. Dawes, awakened, slowly backed up the S.U.V. until a patrol car moved to block her. Then she edged forward and tried to reverse again.

Shouting at her to stop, two officers fired 13 bullets through the passenger-side window that passed over Ms. Dawes’s crouching boyfriend and struck her in the neck, chest and arms. As she collapsed, an officer continued yelling, commanding her boyfriend to reach through the shattered window to open the door so that his hand stayed visible.

“Step out! Get on your knees!” the officer, Christopher Hess, ordered. “Walk on your knees towards me!”

Then, body camera footage shows, he falsely announced into his radio, “They rammed the squad car twice.”

The officers later said they had feared the Dodge might run them down, but in a rare departure, skeptical prosecutors persuaded a grand jury to indict Officer Hess for aggravated assault.

At trial, his lawyers attacked Ms. Dawes’s character — she had heroin and methamphetamines in her system, the Dodge had been stolen before she bought it and a handgun was later found on the back floorboard. Christopher Hess, by then fired from the police force, was acquitted.

Many of the fatal vehicle stops reviewed by The Times unfolded in a similar way: Officers acted as if their lives were in constant peril, and killed drivers who failed to obey orders.

“The fear is excessive,” said Grant Fredericks, an authority on the forensic analysis of dash- and body-camera footage and a former officer who has examined scores of police shootings at vehicle stops. “The more fear officers feel, the more aggressive they become.”

But no degree of fright, he said, explained the approach of some officers, who often threatened or used deadly force in response to mere defiance.

“The reaction sometimes seems to be, ‘How dare you?” Mr. Fredericks said. “‘How dare you not do what you’re told to do?’”

Officers have killed more than 5,000 civilians since Sept. 30, 2016, according to data on police killings collected by The Washington Post and the research groups Mapping Police Violence and Fatal Encounters. Many died during felonies in progress, home invasions, domestic violence calls or shootouts in the streets. At least 1,500 were killed by officers pulling over suspected carjackers, during chases and at other types of vehicle stops.

From that data, The Times identified the more than 400 unarmed drivers and passengers who were not under pursuit for a violent crime. All of the deaths were reported by local news organizations, and a small number made national headlines.

The Times examined video or audio from more than 180 of those encounters; interviewed dozens of chiefs, officers, trainers and prosecutors; submitted scores of open-records requests to obtain investigative files; and reviewed civil claims from more than 150 cases.

More than 75 of the drivers were suspected of car theft, either because of registration issues or stolen vehicle reports. Nearly 60 motorists were stopped for reckless driving, including many who turned out to be drunk or high. Others were pulled over for questioning about nonviolent offenses like shoplifting.

The police say there is no such thing as a routine stop; the driver’s behavior can turn it into a high-risk encounter, calling for drawn weapons and other measures. In The Times’s review, motorists were often resistant or evasive. Some had been hiding illegal drugs or weapons; others had had outstanding warrants for failing to pay a fine or missing a court date.

Among those killed, some became icons of the Black Lives Matter movement, including Daunte Wright (shot in Brooklyn Center, Minn., after being pulled over for expired registration tags); Rayshard Brooks (shot running from officers in a Wendy’s parking lot in Atlanta); and Jordan Edwards (a 15-year-old passenger shot leaving a house party in Balch Springs, Texas). But relatives of many others also questioned whether race played a role in their deaths.

In 2017, a white officer in Kent, Wash., told investigators that he had stopped a Honda Accord in part because its young Black occupants seemed afraid of him; one “had a scared look on his face.”

The officer pulled over the car for a canceled registration, and the driver, Giovonn Joseph-McDade, a 20-year-old community college student, sped off. A second officer shot him. Although prosecutors deemed the shooting justified, a civil court judge questioned whether the officers had faced any real threat, and the city of Kent this year paid the driver’s family $4.4 million to settle a wrongful-death suit.

“My son never would have been pulled over had he not been Black,” said his mother, Sonia Joseph. Police officials declined to comment.

Kalfani Ture, a criminologist at Mount St. Mary’s University in Maryland and a former Georgia police officer who is Black, said overstating the risks compounded racial bias. “Police think ‘vehicle stops are dangerous’ and ‘Black people are dangerous,’ and the combination is volatile,” he said.

The problem is especially acute at so-called pretextual stops, he argued, where officers seek out minor violations — expired registration, a dangling air freshener, tinted windows — to search a car they consider suspicious.

“We fish,” Dr. Ture said, recalling his past work as a policeman. “If I follow a car for five minutes, I can always find one or two moving violations.”

Officers in about four dozen of the deadly cases shot unarmed drivers because they had appeared to reach for something or held an object that the police took for a weapon — including several cellphones, two butane torch lighters, a cigarette, an electric toothbrush case, a bottle of antifreeze and a bag of sandwiches.

Body-camera footage showed an officer in Evansville, Ind., in 2019 pleading with a drunken motorist to stop reaching below his seat: “Whoa, whoa, whoa, let me see your hands!”

When the man didn’t comply, Officer Mario Reid shot him — then discovered that he had been grabbing a hammer, not a gun.

“That is the worst day of my life,” Officer Reid said in an interview.

But he defended meeting disobedience with deadly force. “If an officer is giving commands repeatedly and they are not being followed and the officer hesitates a bit — there are plenty of those officers who are no longer living or were seriously injured,” he said. “I understand the risks involved in doing what I do, and I have to get up every day and face that.”

In other cases, officers were carried away by the momentum of a chase. “Police are trained and driven to satisfy their curiosity,” said Chief Kenton Buckner of Syracuse. “Sometimes that gets the best of them — why is the car running from me when I stopped them for a taillight?”

On Christmas Day in 2018, Officer Marco Mercado in San Jose, Calif., heard a tip over police radio about a white car that may have been used in a drive-by shooting. He spotted a white Toyota Camry with a license plate that had been reported stolen. When the driver did not pull over, he suspected it was the car linked to the shooting, he later told investigators.

The fleeing Toyota crashed into a chain-link fence. Boxed in by patrol cars, the driver edged forward and back 11 times in an attempt to free the vehicle. “I’m going to shoot you if you don’t stop,” Officer Mercado threatened, according to body camera footage.

Moments later, as the Toyota bumped into a patrol car blocking its path, he and three other officers fired 37 shots at the driver, 24-year-old Jennifer Vasquez, killing her.

The officers told investigators that she was reaching for something, that she might have tried to run them down, that her eyes looked “scary,” according to a prosecutor’s report. But Officer Mercado also told investigators that he had decided “to draw a line in the sand” if Ms. Vasquez did not stop driving.

He later learned he had followed the wrong car. The police concluded that the stolen Toyota, which Ms. Vasquez had borrowed from a friend, had not been involved in the drive-by shooting.

‘Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card’

“Can you prosecute a police officer for a killing at a vehicle stop?” asked Mr. Gill, the Salt Lake County prosecutor. “Theoretically, you can. But practically it becomes virtually impossible.”

The legal standard, he said, “overwhelmingly errs on the side of sheltering police misconduct.”

Although protests since the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis last year appear to have spurred a modest uptick in criminal charges against officers, the police continue to claim special allowances for the use of force at vehicle stops.

In the more than 400 killings of unarmed drivers, The Times identified charges brought against officers in 32 cases. Among the five officers who were convicted, one got probation, another served seven months, one is awaiting sentencing and a fourth will soon have his appeal heard by the Texas Supreme Court.

The fifth conviction was for murdering George Floyd, who had been pulled from a car on suspicion of passing a fake $20 bill at a Minneapolis convenience store.

Nearly two dozen criminal cases are pending. The New Mexico officer who threatened to choke out a motorist is facing murder charges; the city of Las Cruces paid $6.5 million to settle a wrongful-death suit. That officer was also fired, one of more than two dozen who were dismissed or resigned.

A series of U.S. Supreme Court rulings have expanded the powers and protections of officers pulling over cars, including a 1997 decision holding that the police “must routinely exercise unquestioned command of the situation” because of the unpredictable dangers, and a 2014 decision allowing the police to shoot at moving cars.

“You watch the movies about bank robberies, you know, it happens all the time,” Justice Antonin Scalia said during oral arguments, asserting the practice was standard. “Are these movies unrealistic?”

Even in instances of officer-created jeopardy — the police putting their lives at risk and then citing that risk to justify killing a driver — half the federal appeals courts tell judges and juries to look only at the final moment when a trigger is pulled, ignoring officers’ earlier choices, said Cynthia Lee, a law professor at George Washington University. The results are “arbitrary and inconsistent,” she said.

Police advocates say that even if officers step into the path of a car or reach into a window, a tactical error should not cost them their right to self-defense.

“That doesn’t give somebody a green light to run them over and try to kill them,” said David Mastagni, a California lawyer for police officers and unions. “It doesn’t take away the officers’ justification to use deadly force.”

In more than 150 formal statements or public comments declining to bring charges, some prosecutors emphasized that the legal standard tied their hands, regardless of whether a killing was avoidable. Many others focused on the faults of the drivers, such as their criminal records or drug use.

After the Tennessee sheriff ordered deputies to shoot at a fleeing pickup to avoid damaging patrol cars, for example, the district attorney noted that the driver had taken methamphetamines and had veered all over the road to try to evade his pursuers. He was “a dangerous and unstable subject,” District Attorney Bryant Dunaway wrote.

In other cases, officers faced no charges even when evidence appeared to undermine their explanations.

A Georgia state trooper told investigators that, after forcing a Nissan Sentra with a broken taillight into a ditch, he had felt threatened by its engine “revving” and wheels “wrenching” toward him. A state inquiry found that the battery had been disconnected, the engine disabled and the wheels pointed away from the officer. But a grand jury this spring declined to indict the trooper, who is white, for killing Julian Lewis, a Black 60-year-old carpenter, with a bullet to the head. The possibility of racial bias “is hard to ignore,” said his son, Brook Bacon.

Claiming to fear for their lives “is a get-out-of-jail-free card for the police,” said Sheila Albers, a former middle school principal in Overland Park, Kan., whose 17-year-old son, John, was killed by the police.

After friends reported John as a suicide risk, officers found him backing the family minivan out of the driveway, and one fired more than a dozen shots into the vehicle. Prosecutors accepted the officer’s explanation that the boy had driven “in an extremely aggressive manner.”

But exhibits submitted in a wrongful-death lawsuit indicated that the minivan had been moving at about three miles per hour and that the officer was not in its path when he started shooting. The city paid the family $2.3 million to settle.

Some shootings were commended. In January 2019, Deputy Jason Hanratty of Pueblo County, Colo., stepped out of his car to confront the driver of a GMC Yukon with a broken taillight that had spun out on a lawn after a chase.

When the S.U.V. lurched toward the officer, he pushed off against the driver’s side hood with his hand and got out of the way, previously unreported body-cam footage shows.

But, Deputy Hanratty later told investigators, he nonetheless feared the S.U.V. would hit him, and he was frightened by the driver, Alicia Martinez, who was 20 and pregnant: She was “ghost-white” and “looking through me, like I was not even there.” He fired three shots through her side window as the car passed, seriously injuring her and killing her 18-year-old passenger, Amiliano Apodaca.

A year later, the sheriff awarded a medal of valor to the officer, who by then had made sergeant, praising his actions that night as “truly heroic.”

Arya Sundaram contributed reporting. Seamus Hughes contributed research.

A Times investigation into a common defense for shooting motorists found that some officers had put themselves in danger. Others appeared to face no peril at all.

By Kim Barker, Steve Eder, David D. Kirkpatrick and Arya Sundaram

PHENIX CITY, Ala. — On a Sunday in May 2017, a patrol car sat outside the city’s oldest public housing project, waiting for anyone acting suspiciously. The two police officers heard Cedric Mifflin before they saw him, blasting music from a silver Mercury Grand Marquis. Then they tried to pull him over: He wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.

Mr. Mifflin, a 27-year-old Black man, kept driving. What happened next is disputed, but how it ended is certain. Officer Michael Seavers leapt out of the patrol car, drew his gun and fired 16 times at the moving car. He thought Mr. Mifflin intended to run him over, he said later.

“I had never felt the fear that I had at that moment,” Officer Seavers, who is white, told investigators in a statement. He said he thought of what a vehicle can do “to a human body and how I would die if I didn’t react.”

The officer’s defense of killing Mr. Mifflin, who wielded neither a gun nor a knife, is one repeated over and over across the country: The vehicle was a weapon. In a New York Times investigation of car stops that left more than 400 similarly unarmed people dead over the last five years, those words were routinely used to explain why police officers had fired at drivers.

When asked in a deposition whether a man he had fatally shot in 2017 had used a weapon, an officer in Forest Park, Ill., answered, “Other than a moving vehicle, no.”

Minutes after sheriff’s deputies near San Leandro, Calif., killed a shoplifting suspect and injured a passenger in an S.U.V. in early 2019, an officer asked what weapons they had been armed with. “A vehicle,” one deputy replied.

And a lawyer for a sheriff’s deputy who shot a driver in Wichita, Kan., in late 2019 said the motorist had used “a 4,500-pound vehicle as a weapon.”

In about 250 of the 400 seemingly avoidable deaths, The Times found that police officers had fired into vehicles that they later claimed posed such a threat. Relative to the population, Black motorists were overrepresented among those killed.

Like Mr. Mifflin, the other drivers had been pursued for nonviolent offenses, many of them minor. A seatbelt ticket in Phenix City that would have cost $41. A cracked taillight in Georgia, a broken headlight in Colorado, an expired registration tag in Texas. Most motorists were killed while attempting to flee.

The country’s largest cities, from New York to Los Angeles, have barred officers from shooting at moving vehicles. The U.S. Justice Department has warned against the practice for decades, pressuring police departments to forbid it. Police academies don’t even train recruits how to fire at a car. The risk of injuring innocent people is considered too great; the idea of stopping a car with a bullet is viewed as wishful thinking.

“Bad idea. Bad to do,” said Carmen Best, the former Seattle police chief, in an interview. “If you think the vehicle is coming toward you, get yourself out of the way.”

Moving vehicles can be deadly. Nine officers have been fatally run over, pinned or dragged by drivers in vehicles approached for minor or nonviolent offenses in the past five years.

But in many instances, local police officers, state troopers and sheriff’s deputies put themselves at risk by jumping in front of moving cars, then aiming their guns at the drivers as if in a Hollywood movie, according to body-camera footage. Or they reached into cars and became entangled with motorists, then opened fire.

Often, the drivers were trying to get away from officers, edging around them, not toward them, the footage shows, and the officers weren’t in the path of the vehicle when they fired.

“You see many where bullets are in the back of the car, in the side of the car,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has researched high-risk police activities for more than 30 years. “In the high 90 percentile of cases I’ve seen, the person’s just trying to get away.”

Some officers who fatally shot motorists didn’t appear to be in any jeopardy at all, The Times review showed. In some cases the vehicle was stationary, even incapable of moving. Yet prosecutors found that the claim that officers feared for their lives or the lives of others was enough to justify all but the rarest of shootings.

Officer Seavers faced no charges in the Mifflin case. Phenix City and state officials have declined to release police body- and dashboard-camera videos of the fatal encounter. “All it’ll do is inflame people, and people don’t understand the fine points of the law,” the city’s lawyer, James McKoon, said in an interview. “And this guy was scared to death when he shot.”

Jeremy Bauer, a forensics expert in Seattle who has testified for police departments nationwide and for families of people killed, reviewed the state investigative report, witness testimony, photographs and other materials and concluded that the officer had not been in peril. It would have been impossible, he said, for Mr. Mifflin to have been headed for Officer Seavers when the shots were fired.

“The officer just wouldn’t have been in the path of the vehicle,” Dr. Bauer said.

Enacting a Ban

Once, Phenix City was known as the Sin City of the South, and its major industry was vice: gambling, brothels and bootleg booze. In 1940, the U.S. secretary of war called it the “wickedest city in America.” Politicians and the police were on the take. After a top candidate in the Alabama attorney general’s race in 1954 pledged to clean up the city, he was gunned down.

Now, the town has a new slogan: “Positively Phenix City.” Local officials still boast of its 2007 BusinessWeek designation as one of the country’s most affordable suburbs — just across the Chattahoochee River from Columbus, Ga. — for raising a family.

The city is typical of many communities where fatal police encounters with motorists have occurred over the past five years. It’s in the South. It has fewer than 50 patrol officers. With under 39,000 residents, it’s relatively small. The police department has lower training and qualification requirements than those of big cities. A G.E.D. is enough.

“They’re not Navy SEALs,” said Kenneth Davis, the district attorney in Russell County, home to Phenix City. “These guys are average guys.”

The chief, Ray Smith, joined the department 32 years ago and has led it for the past 12. His two predecessors each spent decades with the department. Its use-of-force policy — governing how officers are permitted to subdue people — has not been revised to include reforms that many other departments have adopted. Chief Smith didn’t respond to multiple requests for an interview. Neither the police department nor Mr. McKoon responded to detailed questions about The Times’s findings.

Law enforcement killed two unarmed Black men here in 2013: One was shot after he drove through a stop sign, led officers on a chase, fled his car and allegedly refused to come out from under a vehicle; another, naked and mentally ill, died after being stunned with a Taser 19 times and then restrained.

But there was no citywide protest, no Ferguson fallout, no George Floyd moment.

Phenix City’s use-of-force policy mentions that police officers can fire their weapons to “destroy” a threatening animal. It allows for shooting “during range practice or competitive sporting events.” While it prohibits firing from inside a moving vehicle, it doesn’t say anything about shooting at moving vehicles.

That is unusual: Out of nearly 200 departments that had such shootings and provided their policies to The Times, just 13 did not address the issue.

“It’s something that has never come up,” said Chief Darryl Laxton, in Oneida, Tenn. He added: “This is not a very active place. A lot doesn’t go on.”

Most other departments surveyed had policies prohibiting officers from shooting at moving vehicles — but they were ambiguously worded and allowed officers to do so if they felt the need.

Critics of the practice argue that shooting at a driver is ineffective or even disastrous. “It’s like you’ve created an unguided missile,” said Chuck Wexler, the executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy nonprofit. “You’ve basically lost control.”

To identify cases where police fired into vehicles, The Times reviewed data collected by The Washington Post and the research groups Mapping Police Violence and Fatal Encounters. Reporters then filed hundreds of public-records requests, analyzed more than 115 video and audio recordings, examined investigative records and interviewed dozens of experts and motorists’ families. In addition to the 250 otherwise unarmed drivers, scores of such shootings involved motorists who held weapons or were being pursued for violent crimes.

The movement to stop shooting into moving vehicles began in New York City in 1972. The police department banned the practice as part of a package of reforms after an officer shot and killed an 11-year-old boy, who had been joyriding with two friends, and wounded the driver and two passers-by.

In 1972, the city’s police officers were involved in 994 shooting incidents of any kind; the next year, 665. By 2019, officers fired their guns only 52 times. And since the ban, not one on-duty officer has been killed by a vehicle fleeing a traffic stop.

The nation’s 25 largest cities have since adopted similar bans. (Some carve out exceptions for terrorists aiming vehicles into crowds.)

No one disputes that cars can be deadly: Scores of officers have been killed working accident scenes or writing tickets. But no officer in any big city that has banned the practice has been fatally run over by a vehicle he or she stopped.

The bans haven’t entirely stopped the police from fatally shooting unarmed motorists in moving vehicles not suspected in violent crimes. Still, only 11 such deaths have occurred in those departments collectively in the last five years.

Compare that with Honolulu, a city of nearly 350,000. Between 2016 and 2020, officers there shot four unarmed motorists.

On April 1, the department tightened its rules, but with a big exception: Officers could shoot if “the vehicle’s movement poses a threat that justifies the use of deadly force.”

Four days later, officers pursued a stolen car suspected in an armed robbery and two purse snatchings. After it stopped, officers fired 15 shots, hitting the 16-year-old driver, Iremamber Sykap, in the back of the head, records show. Two officers said they shot to protect themselves and “members of the public.” One said the teenager had “rammed” his patrol car and “reversed” directly at him.

But body-cam videos show that the patrol car wasn’t rammed, the car didn’t reverse directly at the officer and officers fired when it was moving away.

The three officers were criminally charged, but a judge dismissed the charges. The officers are back on patrol.

A Stop, a Chase and 16 Bullets

Mr. Mifflin’s friends thought he would become a comedian. They called him “Kevin Hart” because he looked and behaved like the comic-actor. Mr. Mifflin pretended to find the nickname tiresome — “Lol here u go,” he’d write on Facebook — but he embraced it.

He sported a tattoo of praying hands on his left forearm; his right was inked with the name of his daughter, Shay, whom he fathered in high school. If friends got annoyed at him, he’d badger them into forgiveness. Only 5-foot-4 and 130 pounds, Mr. Mifflin acted streetwise, posing like a tough guy in photos. But that was a front; he never got into fights, and friends often mocked him for how he spent his Sunday mornings.

“He was the one who stayed in church with his grandma,” said Dontrell Grier, Mr. Mifflin’s stepbrother.

Mr. Mifflin lived in Columbus with his grandparents, a social worker and a retired small-town Georgia police chief who instructed him to always follow police orders. When Mr. Mifflin was 22, he agreed to testify in court after witnessing a mother leave a toddler alone in a car for at least 20 minutes.

He worked stocking shelves at Walmart and Piggly Wiggly. He loved cars, but he allowed more than eight years of traffic tickets for infractions like driving without a seatbelt spiral into a crisis, including a suspended driver’s license, a misdemeanor for not showing up in court, thousands of dollars in fines and potential jail time, according to court records.

Mr. Mifflin stole $265 from the Piggly Wiggly when he was 26, about the same time he lost his job there, records show. And Walmart later terminated him.

On that fateful Sunday in May 2017, he drove from Columbus to Phenix City to pick up a friend at the Frederick Douglass Homes, a public-housing complex with mostly Black residents.

The officers’ decision to pull him over appeared to be a “pretextual” stop, when the police stop drivers — often people of color — for an infraction and then look for a more serious offense, two policing experts said.

The officers seemed to be “looking for a reason to stop him because they felt that he was up to no good — he plays loud music, he doesn’t have a seatbelt,” said Michael Gennaco, a former federal prosecutor who works with police departments to improve accountability and reviewed the case for The Times.

Why did Mr. Mifflin drive off? Maybe because of the suspended license. Maybe because of a story his stepbrother liked to tell: Mr. Grier had been a passenger in a car pulled over after the driver initially didn’t obey commands to stop. The Phenix City officers had aimed their weapons at him and dragged him out of the vehicle and across a parking lot.

Whatever the reason, instead of complying, Mr. Mifflin sped across a busy road. The police chased him. At that point, he was just four minutes from the Georgia line. He only needed to make it to the corner near Ed’s barbecue, take a couple of turns and cross a bridge.

But an S.U.V. blocked his path: Djaron Green, a manager for a financial company, was about to turn into the restaurant for lunch.

So Mr. Mifflin whipped his car into Ed’s parking lot, stalling out, Mr. Green recalled in an interview. Sirens blaring, the cruiser came to a stop, pointing toward Mr. Mifflin’s rear passenger door, according to the report by the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation, which examines any officer-involved death.

But an S.U.V. blocked his path: Djaron Green, a manager for a financial company, was about to turn into the restaurant for lunch.

So Mr. Mifflin whipped his car into Ed’s parking lot, stalling out, Mr. Green recalled in an interview. Sirens blaring, the cruiser came to a stop, pointing toward Mr. Mifflin’s rear passenger door, according to the report by the Alabama State Bureau of Investigation, which examines any officer-involved death.

The patrol car driver, Cpl. Jason Searcy, told investigators that he had begun to reverse the cruiser and didn’t see anything, but “heard several gunshots.”

Officer Seavers did not reply to requests for comment; most of the other officers mentioned in this article declined to comment or could not be reached. Officer Seavers told state investigators that the Mercury had come straight at him. So did an Ed’s employee who was inside the restaurant during the encounter; she did not respond to messages from The Times.

But Mr. Green, the closest witness, said the car never came near Officer Seavers. Instead, he said, it appeared to move around him. And Dr. Bauer, the forensic expert, concluded that Officer Seavers was never in harm’s way.

Dr. Bauer created a video reconstruction for The Times, drawing on the state report and other records. (The Times offered to let state and city officials review the video; they declined.) The officer initially fired twice; both shots entered the passenger side of the front window at a sharp angle, indicating that the car was moving past the officers, Dr. Bauer said. Both hit Mr. Mifflin. Either would have been fatal.

The vehicle kept traveling forward; Officer Seavers turned his body and his gun to follow. Four bullets entered the passenger’s side of the car. As it passed, the patrolman emptied his magazine, striking the back of the car multiple times, the state investigation shows.

“His life was not in danger if the vehicle was leaving,” said Isaac Lawrence, Mr. Mifflin’s grandfather, who added that he had been trained never to fire at moving vehicles. He wanted to ask the officer, “So why did you shoot him?”

Mr. Mifflin’s sedan drifted across a road and finally stopped at a used-car lot. At first, the two officers thought Mr. Mifflin had fled on foot. Instead, he was slumped over, dying from seven bullet wounds.

Creating Their Own Jeopardy

In November 2020, Deputy Jafet Santiago-Miranda of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office searched for a stolen car in Cocoa, Fla. He spotted a similar vehicle, which pulled into a driveway, then backed out. The deputy left his cruiser and stepped in front of the car, then fired 10 times as it moved slowly forward, the dash-cam video shows.

The driver, A.J. Crooms, 16, and a passenger, Sincere Pierce, 18, who had been planning to hang out with a friend, were dead. Officials later said that the vehicle was not the stolen car. (As in several other cases, guns were later found in or near the car, but they played no role in the confrontation.)

This April, Deputy Nolan Davis of the Delta County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado tried to pull over a white Honda with no license plates. The driver fled, eventually running over “stop sticks” placed by another deputy, which flattened the Honda’s tires. As the car attempted to maneuver between Deputy Davis’s patrol truck and a white truck, he stepped out of his car into the path of the Honda, body-cam footage shows. Deputy Davis moved backward as he fired eight times, even after the Honda passed him. Paige Pierce, 26, was dead.

The driver “was about to hit me,” Deputy Davis told his superior. “I had no choice, Sarge.”

Deputy Davis later said that when he stepped from his patrol truck he thought that the driver may have exited the Honda and been “possibly stopping to flee on foot,” according to a review by the district attorney.

Neither deputy lost their job or faced criminal charges.

In dozens of fatal cases over the past five years, officers reacted similarly, jumping in front of vehicles or failing to move out of the way.

Such decisions are dangerous for both motorists and officers. Over the past five years, three officers who leaned inside vehicles during stops were killed when the drivers took off. Six others were run over by vehicles they were facing down, like Amy Caprio, a Baltimore County police officer killed in May 2018 after responding to a call of a suspicious vehicle connected to a burglary.

“I just wanted to get away,” wrote 17-year-old Dawnta Harris to a judge after running over the officer. “From the bottom of my heart, I thought she was going to move.”

Many big cities that ban shooting into moving vehicles also say officers should not step in front of cars. But of the departments that responded to The Times, more than two-thirds — mostly outside big cities — had no such policy.

“If we have to write a policy to tell someone to not step in front of a moving vehicle, then we wouldn’t be hiring very smart people, would we?” said Capt. Mike McCoy of the Fulshear Police Department in Texas, which has no such ban. “Sometimes, common sense must take over.”

Shootings sometimes had unintended consequences. In the cases reviewed by The Times, law enforcement officers did not just hit drivers: They killed eight passengers and injured at least 17 more.

In December 2017, for instance, a part-time deputy in Grundy County, Tenn., named Mike Holmes kept firing after a Mustang he had pursued for reckless driving fled — hitting the side and rear of the car multiple times. One bullet hit the passenger, Shelby Comer, 20, killing her. (In an interview, Mr. Holmes, who is no longer in law enforcement, said the driver had pointed a gun at him; no gun was ever recovered.)

Mr. Holmes was found guilty of criminally negligent homicide, one of three law enforcement officers convicted after vehicle-as-weapon shootings in the past five years. “If I’ve ever had a regret in my life, it’s making that decision to pursue that Mustang that night,” he said at his sentencing hearing. “I should have discontinued the pursuit. I should have stopped.”

He was given three years’ probation.

A Pair of Settlements

The day after Cedric Mifflin was killed, Phenix City’s police chief said the encounter was traumatic not only for the man’s family “but for the entire police department.” He described the death not as a killing but as a “situation.”

“We’re going to try to find out everything that we can about how to avoid it in the future,” Chief Smith pledged at a news conference.

But as of August, Phenix City had not changed its use-of-force policy to even mention shooting at moving vehicles. Officer Seavers was still a patrol officer. The police department did not respond to questions about whether he had faced any discipline.

In his written statement, the officer said he fired at the rear of the vehicle because if Mr. Mifflin had just tried “to kill a police officer, he wouldn’t hesitate to kill a citizen.”

State investigators waited two days to question Officer Seavers and did not record their interview with him, records show. Mr. Gennaco, one of the nation’s top police oversight consultants, described the state’s inquiry as “inconsistent with basic investigative protocols.”

Mr. Davis, the county’s district attorney, brought the case before a grand jury, typical in police shootings. He called a handful of witnesses and played the body- and dash-cam videos. Police found no weapons or drugs in the car. The grand jury opted not to charge him.

“I honestly thought it could go either way,” Mr. Davis recalled.

After the grand jury decision, Mr. Davis suggested to Mr. Mifflin’s mother, Pochya Sanders, that she get a lawyer — advice he says he always gives in cases like this. She hunted for someone willing to sue Phenix City, she said, but most lawyers told her that Alabama juries side with the police.

Two months after the lawyer she eventually found filed a wrongful-death suit, the city offered Ms. Sanders $100,000 to settle. Her lawyer, Kenneth Shinbaum, advised her to take it, even though neither of them had seen the video footage. So she agreed. (The law firm got 50 percent of the settlement, a high rate for such contingency fee arrangements.)

The city then offered to show her the videos, but she decided that she couldn’t watch her son die. Now, Ms. Sanders said in an interview, she wants them to be made public. “I just need the truth,” she said.

Officer Seavers also sued the city — a workers’ compensation claim over an “accident occurring on the job” the day of Mr. Mifflin’s death. The officer said he suffered hearing loss that day, in all likelihood because of gunfire. The city settled for $5,500.

No police or city official reached out to Mr. Mifflin’s family after he was killed, his mother said. She was the one to identify her son’s bullet-ridden body. “I carried him for nine months. I’m the first person he ever talked to, the first person he ever smelled,” she said.

She chose a baby blue coffin. At the Looking Good clothing store in downtown Columbus, she picked out a $50 blue suit for him. Blue was his color.

Reporting was contributed by Donovan J. Thomas, Rick Rojas, Erica Sweeney, Sydney Cromwell and Glenny Brock. Julie Tate, Susan C. Beachy and Kitty Bennett contributed research.

Busted taillights, missing plates, tinted windows: Across the U.S., ticket revenue funds towns — and the police responsible for finding violations.

By Mike McIntire and Michael H. Keller

Harold Brown’s contribution to the local treasury began as so many others have in Valley Brook, Okla.: A police officer saw that the light above his license plate was out.

“You pulled me over for that? Come on, man,” said Mr. Brown, a security guard headed home from work at 1:30 a.m. Expressing his annoyance was all it took. The officer yelled at Mr. Brown, ordered him out of the car and threw him to the pavement.

After a trip to jail that night in 2018, hands cuffed and blood running down his face onto his uniform, Mr. Brown eventually arrived at the crux of the matter: Valley Brook wanted $800 in fines and fees. It was a fraction of the roughly $1 million that the town of about 870 people collects each year from traffic cases.

A hidden scaffolding of financial incentives underpins the policing of motorists in the United States, encouraging some communities to essentially repurpose armed officers as revenue agents searching for infractions largely unrelated to public safety. As a result, driving is one of the most common daily routines during which people have been shot, Tased, beaten or arrested after minor offenses.

Some of those encounters — like those with Sandra Bland, Walter Scott and Philando Castile — are now notorious and contributed to a national upheaval over race and policing. The New York Times has identified more than 400 others from the past five years in which officers killed unarmed civilians who had not been under pursuit for violent crimes.

Fueling the culture of traffic stops is the federal government, which issues over $600 million a year in highway safety grants that subsidize ticket writing. Although federal officials say they do not impose quotas, at least 20 states have evaluated police performance on the number of traffic stops per hour, which critics say contributes to overpolicing and erosion of public trust, particularly among members of certain racial groups.

Many municipalities across the country rely heavily on ticket revenue and court fees to pay for government services, and some maintain outsize police departments to help generate that money, according to a review of hundreds of municipal audit reports, town budgets, court files and state highway records.

This is, for the most part, not a big-city phenomenon. While Chicago stands out as a large city with a history of collecting millions from motorists, the towns that depend most on such revenue have fewer than 30,000 people. Over 730 municipalities rely on fines and fees for at least 10 percent of their revenue, enough to pay for an entire police force in some small communities, an analysis of census data shows.

A majority are in the South and Midwest, though clusters also appear outside New York City and Washington. They include Henderson, La., a town of about 2,000 people perched along Interstate 10 that collected $1.7 million in fines in 2019 — 89 percent of its general revenues — and where officers were accused of illegally receiving cash rewards for writing tickets. Oliver, Ga., with about 380 residents, gets more than half its budget from fines, but an investigation last year found that the local police had improperly written more than $40,000 in tickets outside their jurisdiction.

In Bratenahl, Ohio, the town government is so dependent on traffic enforcement that the police chief castigated his officers as “badge-wearing slugs” in an email when a downturn in ticket writing jeopardized raises. Ticket revenue helped finance sheriff’s equipment in Amherst County, Va.; a “peace officers annuity and benefit fund” in Doraville, Ga.; and police training in Connecticut, Oklahoma and South Carolina.

“The message goes out that if you want more training, then go ahead and write more traffic tickets,” said Gil Kerlikowske, a former police chief in Seattle and three other cities.

To show how a dependence on ticket revenue can shape traffic enforcement, The Times examined the practices of three states — Ohio, Oklahoma and Virginia — where police traffic stops have set off controversy. What emerges is a tangle of conflicts and contradictions that are often unacknowledged or explained away.

Mayors of predominantly white suburbs in Ohio, for example, defended the ticket-blitzing of Black drivers from Cleveland as an acceptable, if unfortunate, side effect of vigorously patrolling brief sections of interstates within their borders.

Some officers in Oklahoma, insistent that public safety is their goal, no longer cite drunken motorists for driving under the influence, and instead issue less-serious tickets that keep the drivers out of district court and generate more money for the town.

And in a small Virginia town last December, just days after the police threatened and pepper-sprayed a Black and Latino Army lieutenant, Caron Nazario, over a license plate infraction — body-camera video released in April would elicit public outrage — elected officials questioned the chief on why ticket revenue was down for the year. He later reminded his officers to issue at least “two tickets per hour” during federally funded patrols.

Mr. Kerlikowske said that ticket quotas created bad incentives, but that there was value in police traffic enforcement focused on speeding, drinking and reckless driving — a “more important role than just, ‘you have a taillight out’ or ‘you have a tag light out.’” Using small violations as a pretext to search for more serious crimes was “a pretty weak excuse,” he said, given their rarity and the unnecessary risk that encounters could escalate.

A traffic signal citation in Euclid, Ohio, led to Richard Hubbard III, then 25, being beaten and Tased by an officer who was later fired, then reinstated by an arbitrator and is now facing assault charges. For Juanisha Brooks, a 34-year-old Defense Department employee, it was unlit taillights that prompted a Virginia state trooper to pull over, handcuff and arrest her — a traffic stop prosecutors later declared illegal.

And in Cashion, Okla., an officer chased, threw to the ground and Tased a 65-year-old grandmother who initially refused to accept an $80 ticket for a broken taillight. Ed Blau, a lawyer who represented the woman, Debra Hamil, said there was an entrenched financial motivation behind such traffic stops.

“You’ve got to fund the government somehow,” he said, “and that’s exactly how they do it: through fines and fees.”

The Money Machine

Newburgh Heights, a frayed industrial village of about a half square mile with 2,000 residents just south of Cleveland, doggedly monitors traffic on the short stretch of Interstate 77 that passes through.

Its 21 police officers cruise around looking for vehicles to pull over, and aim speed cameras from the Harvard Avenue overpass or from a folding chair beside the highway. This augments the town’s automated cameras.

All told, revenue from traffic citations, which typically accounts for more than half the town’s budget, totaled $3 million in 2019. Some of that money is processed through the Newburgh Heights Mayor’s Court, one of 286 anachronistic judicial offices that survive, mostly in small towns, across Ohio.

A 2019 report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio found that 1 in 6 traffic tickets in the state were issued in towns with mayor’s courts, which the A.C.L.U. called a “shadowy and unaccountable quasi-judicial system that wrings revenue from drivers.” The U.S. Supreme Court, as far back as 1927, flagged the inherent conflict in Ohio mayors imposing fines to pay “marshals, inspectors and detectives” who, in turn, generated cases.

The fixation on revenue has made mayor’s courts an enduring source of controversy. Years of complaints about tiny Linndale, population 160, raking in as much as $1 million annually from speed traps led to a ban on mayor’s courts in towns of under 200 residents. In Kirkersville, the police chief resigned, citing, among other things, pressure from the mayor on traffic enforcement.

Trevor Elkins, the mayor of Newburgh Heights, said his town’s increasing use of cameras has reduced the need for traffic stops, though the latter remain disproportionately high, according to state data. Either way, funding a significant police force — nearly triple the small-town average — is “really what our revenue goes for,” he said.

“That has gone into public safety, whether that is police, fire, building department and the service department,” the mayor said.

Publicly, mayors insist their courts are not used to generate money, yet privately that is often the focus of their concerns. The mayor’s court in Bratenahl, a wealthy suburb on Lake Erie, typically has more than twice as many traffic cases each year as there are residents in town, according to state records.

But that was not enough for Mayor John Licastro, who emailed his police chief in November 2018 that a “downturn in mayor’s court revenue” was exacerbating a budget crunch and employee raises could be affected.

Chief Richard Dolbow sent a blunt email to officers: “I will be looking at stats and scheduling to see what I should do to motivate the badge wearing slugs that have fallen short on the promise and jeopardized our financial raises that we have worked so hard to maintain.”

Mr. Dolbow, who announced his retirement in August, did not respond to a request for comment. Mr. Licastro said, “The concern I expressed to the chief was because of a drop in revenue across the board, not just revenue from our mayor’s court.” That, he added, “affects all aspects of how we govern, including employee compensation.”

Bratenahl, with a population of 1,300 that is 83 percent white, uses its roughly 18 officers to patrol a strip of Interstate 90 that skirts the town’s border with Cleveland, where half the residents are Black. As a result, many days, the crowd in Bratenahl mayor’s court is mostly Black.

When Caitlin Johnson, a former journalist who had recently relocated to Bratenahl, tried to raise this issue at a public meeting, she said, the once-welcoming community turned cold. Bratenahl residents “love the police,” whom they view as a bulwark against big-city crime, she said.

“If you live there and you have a problem, any little thing, the police will be right there to help you,” said Ms. Johnson, who has since moved away. “But that is not the way that the people who pass through Bratenahl experience the police.”

Mayor Licastro said officers were simply following the law.

“We don’t choose who drives the Shoreway,” he said.

Mr. Elkins offered a similar defense of Newburgh Heights, where Black residents account for about 22 percent of the population yet often make up a majority at his mayor’s court. A Times analysis of more than 4,000 traffic citations there found that 76 percent of license and insurance violations, and 63 percent of speeding cases involved Black motorists.

“We don’t really control who drives through our community,” he said.

Public Safety and Profiteering

On April 19, 1995, Oklahoma State Trooper Charles J. Hanger, nicknamed “The Hangman” for his zeal in pursuing traffic violations, made one of the most famous of roadway stops.

Heading north on I-35, Trooper Hanger spotted a battered 1977 Mercury Grand Marquis with no license plate. Its driver was Timothy J. McVeigh who, about 90 minutes earlier, had detonated a truck full of explosives outside the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people in what then was the worst act of terrorism on American soil.

The McVeigh case holds mythic status among police officers, for whom it is a go-to rejoinder to concerns that many traffic stops are pretexts for raising revenue or searching, without cause, for evidence of other crimes. But researchers and some former police chiefs say that for every occasional lucky break, hundreds of innocent motorists are subjected to needless scrutiny, expense and potential danger.

“Because everybody on the road violates traffic laws, that allows the police, who are also in charge of criminal law enforcement, to investigate crime without meeting any of the standards required for criminal investigation,” said Sarah A. Seo, a law professor at Columbia University and the author of a history of traffic enforcement.

As early as the 1910s, Dr. Seo said, departments found that taking on traffic enforcement meant they could hire officers and expand their investigative powers. By 1920, traffic fines helped the Los Angeles police traffic division become “practically self-supporting,” according to an annual report at the time.

“We think that modern police departments and their power came from the need to fight crime,” Dr. Seo said. “Actually, it started with traffic enforcement.”

While tickets and the threat of punishment deter some would-be offenders, the need for municipalities to sustain that revenue model appears to be an incentive for many traffic stops today. An analysis of North Carolina court data by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis found that “significantly more tickets” were issued when localities experienced financial difficulties, suggesting they were “used as a revenue-generation tool rather than solely a means to increase public safety.”

Thirty-one states and Washington, D.C., required annual vehicle inspections before 1976, but many dropped them over time, saying they failed to deliver safety benefits. Indeed, the Government Accountability Office found that vehicle component failure figured in only a small percentage of crashes, and there was no evidence that things like broken taillights were significant factors.

Nevertheless, state and local governments continue to profit from catching violations that are largely unrelated to traffic safety.

In the 2019 fiscal year, Valley Brook, Okla., collected over $100,000 from tickets for “defective equipment” like Mr. Brown’s burned-out tag light, with citations issued, on average, nearly every day.

A majority of stops in this town of less than a half square mile occur along a four-lane road with the police station, the courthouse, a cannabis dispensary, a liquor store owned by the mayor’s wife, and three strip clubs. Valley Brook — which collects 72 percent of its revenues from fines, the highest in the state — encourages swift payments; in court one night in July, a local judge told people to call friends and family to get money for fines, or else face jail.

Chief Michael A. Stamp defended the police department’s practices. Because their jurisdiction covers only one block along the main roadway, he said, officers look for broken taillights or “wide turns” to catch more serious infractions.

“I put officers out on the street every single night for the sole purpose of drug and alcohol enforcement, because it’s such a big problem that we have here,” Chief Stamp said. He conceded the town’s dependence on traffic tickets, but added, “I will stand by the fact that what we are doing out here also saves lives.”

By some measures, Nicholas Bowser, 38, is exactly the kind of driver the chief says he wants to take off the road. Rather than pulling over around midnight on July 2, he led officers on a chase from Valley Brook to his home about a mile away. Upon his surrender, the police found a handgun at his feet and discovered his blood alcohol content exceeded the legal limit.

That might have been enough to keep Mr. Bowser from driving for a while, or have a court-ordered breathalyzer installed in his truck. But the next day, he retrieved his truck from the impound. All he had to do was pay $2,185.11 in estimated fines and fees to Valley Brook.

Local police had charged him with “negligent driving” and “public intoxication” — lesser crimes than driving drunk, which must be transferred to district court. Some lawyers say that a 2016 law designed to prevent repeat offenders’ drunken-driving records from staying hidden in local court systems has incentivized towns to downgrade offenses, keeping the ticket — and the revenue.

“The law put a hole in cities’ pocketbooks,” said Bruce Edge, an Oklahoma defense lawyer specializing in drunken-driving cases. So they reduce the charges, he said. “They get the money, and the driver is not going to be the least bit unhappy.”

Chief Stamp acknowledged that they file drunken-driving incidents as “public intoxication” but said revenue was not a factor and noted that prosecutors hadn’t pursued previous D.U.I. cases they had sent.

In an interview, Mr. Bowser said, “I should have gotten a D.U.I.” This summer, after he requested a jury trial, Valley Brook dropped the charges against him and refunded about $2,000.

After details emerged of the case involving Mr. Brown, the security guard, those charges too were dismissed, the officer was disciplined and Chief Stamp called to apologize. Still, Mr. Brown sued the town, which he asserts has turned traffic enforcement into a ruthless profit-making enterprise.

“They are lawless,” he said.

A Culture of Quotas

When Lieutenant Nazario’s mistreatment by the police made national headlines in April, officials in Windsor, Va., fired one of the officers involved and called the case an aberration. But in many ways, the traffic stop was routine.

Windsor is one of nearly 100 Virginia communities to receive federal grants encouraging tickets. The annual grants, awarded by state authorities, ranged last year from $900 to the village of Exmore for nabbing seatbelt scofflaws to $1 million to Fairfax County for drunken-driving enforcement. Windsor got $15,750 to target speeders.

There is little doubt that these grants affect the economics, and frequency, of traffic stops. In an interview, Windsor’s police chief, Rodney Riddle, denied having ticket quotas, though he suggested the “bean counters” in town hall might welcome the money.

But in a January email to officers, obtained through an open-records request, the chief pushed for enough tickets to comply with the grant paying the hourly cost of patrols.

“Please remember,” he wrote, “that you are required to write a minimum of two tickets per hour while on grant time and there is zero tolerance.”

Jessica Cowardin, a spokeswoman for the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, said the number of citations “is just one of many things we look at to evaluate how effective a grant is.” She added, “We do not require nor encourage grant-funded police departments to issue a prescribed number of traffic citations.”

Authorities in Virginia are well aware of the risks of tying traffic stops to money, whether from fines or grants. A state inspector general report in 2013 warned about providing incentives for police to conduct “excessive enforcement solely to generate additional revenue.”

The Virginia grants are a fraction of the roughly $600 million that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration sends to states each year. Lucia Sanchez, a spokeswoman for the federal agency, said it did not encourage or require quotas or targets for grant recipients.

But a review of state grant applications found that the number of traffic stops is a common performance measure. In Arkansas, for instance, the goal was “three vehicle stops per hour” during grant-funded patrols, while in Madison, S.D., officers were required to “obtain two citations per grant hour.”

Indiana officials boasted in their 2014 annual report that officers enforcing seatbelt laws averaged 3.26 stops per hour. One was in Hammond, where an officer on grant-funded patrol pulled over a Black family and ended up in a dispute with a passenger, Jamal Jones, after demanding he identify himself. Video shows officers smashing a car window and firing a Taser at Mr. Jones, who, according to a lawsuit he later filed, tried to retrieve a document to use for identification.

It was a traffic ticket.

For all the billions spent to promote ticket-writing by police, there is little evidence that it has helped achieve the grants’ primary goal: reducing fatal car crashes.

In 2019 there were 33,244 fatal crashes nationwide, up from 30,296 in 2010. Traffic safety experts say targeted enforcement works, but improvements in automobile technology and highway engineering account for much of the progress since the 1970s and ’80s, when annual fatal crashes routinely exceeded 40,000.

In the wake of the George Floyd protests, some municipalities and states are rethinking their approach to traffic stops. Berkeley, Calif., has proposed shifting away from police enforcement, in favor of an unarmed civilian corps; Virginia lawmakers prohibited stops initiated because of defective taillights, tinted windows and loud exhaust.

Fallout from the Nazario case moved Windsor to pursue ways to slow traffic “while reducing police and citizen contacts,” including electronic signs and rumble strips. The Windsor police also ended grant-funded patrols, saying it was “in the best interest of our agency and our community.”

When the town council presented a new budget for the upcoming fiscal year, it projected revenue increases from all major sources except one: traffic fines.

Arya Sundaram contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.

A New York Times visual investigation rolled back the footage of fatal traffic stops to examine the causes and the consequences of officer-created jeopardy.

Robin Stein, Haley Willis, Brenna Smith, Natalie Reneau, Rumsey Taylor, David Kirkpatrick, Steve Eder, Kim Barker and Michael Beswetherick

A Pennsylvania state trooper was returned to duty following three investigations by his own agency. A fourth inquiry is underway.

By Kim Barker, Steve Eder and David D. Kirkpatrick

LEBANON, Pa. — In November 2008, Pennsylvania Trooper Jay Splain was honored at a county law enforcement banquet as a hero, the police officer of the year. The reason: He had shot and killed a suicidal man who allegedly pointed an Uzi submachine gun at him.

That was the first killing. Trooper Splain went on to fatally shoot three more people in separate incidents, an extraordinary tally for an officer responsible for patrolling largely rural areas with low rates of violent crime. All four who died were troubled, struggling with drugs, mental illness or both. In two cases, including that of the man with the Uzi, family members had called the police for help because their relatives had threatened to kill themselves.

The most recent death was last month, when Trooper Splain shot an unarmed man in his Volkswagen Beetle. After learning that the officer had previously killed three other people over nearly 15 years, the man’s sister, Autumn Krouse, asked, “Why would that person still be employed?”

Trooper Splain is an outlier. Most officers never fire their weapons. Until now, his full record of killings has not been disclosed; the Pennsylvania State Police even successfully fought a lawsuit seeking to identify him and provide other details in one shooting. In the agency’s more than a century of policing, no officer has ever been prosecuted for fatally shooting someone, according to a spokesman. That history aligns with a longstanding pattern across the country of little accountability for police officers’ use of deadly force.

Prosecutors and a grand jury concluded that Trooper Splain’s first three lethal shootings were justified, and an inquiry into the most recent one is ongoing. Rather than have independent outsiders look into the killings, the police agency has conducted its own investigations — which were led by officers from his unit — raising questions about the rigor of the inquiries.

“When a police officer has shot at and potentially killed a civilian, the public will never trust the police agency to investigate itself and be unbiased,” said Tom Hogan, the former district attorney of Chester County, Pa. A Republican, he helped write recommendations by the state prosecutors’ association for independent investigations — a reform that many departments resist, but one sought by the national prosecutors’ association and major policing groups.

In its review of Trooper Splain’s killings, The New York Times found inconsistencies between the evidence of what occurred and what the state police said had happened. The officer appeared to have departed from police protocols in several of the fatal confrontations, according to interviews and an examination of investigative and court records.

In three of the encounters, the people killed were in vehicles. The trooper shot two unarmed drivers because they were allegedly using their vehicles as weapons, a frequent rationale, The Times found in an earlier investigation that uncovered hundreds of seemingly avoidable killings by the police — often with impunity. Many large police departments ban shooting at moving vehicles because it is very often dangerous, ineffective and unnecessary.

Trooper Splain, who is on desk duty until the pending inquiry is completed, did not return calls or reply to a letter seeking comment. The other troopers who were involved in the shootings or who led the investigations declined to comment or did not respond to messages. David Kennedy, the president of the state troopers’ union, responded on Trooper Splain’s behalf to written questions, saying he had acted with courage and “was forced to make split-second decisions no one hopes they ever have to make.”

Cpl. Brent Miller, a spokesman for the Pennsylvania State Police, said, “We are confident we have the resources to investigate such incidents thoroughly and objectively.” He referred questions on the killings to district attorneys. Asked whether Trooper Splain had ever faced disciplinary action, Cpl. Miller said that any such records were confidential.

All troopers involved in shootings must attend specialized training to assess their physical and mental fitness before returning to active duty, he said, adding that in some cases, troopers may also be required to undergo use-of-force training at the police academy.

Darrel W. Stephens, a former longtime police chief who now helps run a policing research institute at Florida State University, called the four shootings a “red flag.”

“Four is incredibly unusual,” he said. “That is out there on the edge.” Even if the shootings can be legally justified, he said, the pattern needs to be “examined very closely” to determine why the same officer repeatedly resorted to deadly force. “Because they can, it doesn’t mean they should,” he said.

It’s not clear how common it is for police officers to fatally shoot multiple people during their careers. No database keeps track. In 2012, an officer in Scottsdale, Ariz., retired after his sixth fatal shooting. In 2015, a sheriff’s deputy in Broward County, Fla., was involved in his fourth fatal shooting. Both officers belonged to SWAT teams, called into dangerous situations where gunfire is most common.

Trooper Splain, 41, is a patrol officer who works in largely rural swaths of Pennsylvania, where the state police rarely kill anyone. During his time on the force, he has been responsible for four of the nine fatal shootings by troopers in the three counties where they occurred, according to a Times analysis of cases identified by the research group Fatal Encounters. The killings by Trooper Splain were reported by local news outlets, although he was mentioned by name only in one case.

From a young age, Jay Splain seemed inspired by the military. The son of a radiologist and a nurse, he grew up in Allentown, Pa., and attended the elite Hill prep school outside Philadelphia. He belonged to the school’s gun club. His senior yearbook page pictured him holding a rifle, cited the motto of the U.S. Marine Corps and quoted Stonewall Jackson, the Confederate general, twice.

He went on to the Virginia Military Institute, where Jackson had once been an artillery instructor. Jay Splain enrolled in a military officer training program, joined the school’s competitive rifle team and the Semper Fi Society, and referred to his “warrior image” in his college yearbook bio.

But in 2004 Mr. Splain became a state trooper, with duties like making D.U.I. arrests, tracking down thieves and, on one occasion, catching a suspect in “a paintball incident,” state police newsletters show. His former college roommate, Army Lt. Col. Nicholas Shallcross, said that his ambitions had shifted during college from the military to law enforcement.

Trooper Splain, the lieutenant colonel said, saw himself as “a protector.”

A Call For Help

In July 2007, Joseph Rotkewicz, 37, who had bipolar disorder, took two of his brother’s guns into a room of his family’s home and repeatedly threatened to kill himself, pointing a gun at his head. His father had recently died, and his girlfriend had had an affair with his best friend.

For an hour, his sister, Linda Hunsicker, and a friend, Hans Frendt, tried to talk him down, Ms. Hunsicker recalled in an interview. Then Mr. Rotkewicz fired at least two shots at the ceiling. Ms. Hunsicker said her brother never threatened her or Mr. Frendt.

“He just kept begging me not to call the cops,” she recalled in an interview. “I wish I would have listened.”

On his way out, he heard one of them demand that Mr. Rotkewicz drop his weapon, followed by two gunshots, the report said.

Trooper Splain shot Mr. Rotkewicz twice in the chest, records show. Pennsylvania State Police later said that Mr. Rotkewicz had pointed the Uzi at Trooper Splain.

For this, his unit named him trooper of the year. In a letter later nominating Trooper Splain for the Lehigh County officer of the year, his commanding officer wrote that Mr. Rotkewicz had a “history of mental disease” and was “threatening his life and the lives of others.”

Trooper Splain had seen Mr. Rotkewicz holding the Uzi beneath his chin, the letter said, but it did not mention any electrical tape. The letter then said Mr. Rotkewicz “ignored repeated orders from Trooper Splain to stop and drop the firearm” and “lowered the gun forward” toward the trooper.

In a court filing years later, a lawyer for the state police acknowledged that Mr. Rotkewicz had affixed the Uzi “to his chest and neck by means of the black colored electrical tape.” Although it’s possible Mr. Rotkewicz broke the tape, the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy wrote, “The tape has been wrapped several times about the neck and is kinked in several areas.”

The Pennsylvania State Police typically assign a lead investigator from the same troop’s major case team to lead the criminal inquiry. At the time, Trooper Splain worked out of the headquarters of Troop M — the same barracks as the lead investigator.

Joseph Kuhns, a criminologist at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte who did a study for the Major Cities Chiefs Association on investigations of police shootings, called it “highly unusual” to assign officers from the same unit to examine a shooting.

For almost 10 years, the state police resisted Ms. Hunsicker’s efforts to obtain the police investigative report so she could find out what happened to her brother. In a court filing, her lawyer said the police’s refusal to provide the report was an effort to “cover up wrongful conduct.” She didn’t know the name of the officer who killed her brother until a Times reporter told her.

James B. Martin, a Republican who is the longtime district attorney of Lehigh County, said in an interview that, after meeting with the lead investigator, he had ruled the shooting justified — a decision he called a “no-brainer.” He said he did not recall any claims that the gun had been taped to Mr. Rotkewicz.

Mr. Martin saw nothing wrong with allowing the police to investigate themselves.

“The Pennsylvania State Police is a troop of 4,500 very well-qualified police officers who do an excellent job, and their integrity, as far as I’m concerned, is beyond reproach,” he said.

On a Saturday in May 2017, Anthony Ardo threatened to kill himself by blowing his head off with an explosive. Addicted to drugs for years, the 47-year-old was reeling after a breakup and being evicted by his mother, Jean Monaghan. After she called 911 seeking help for him, Trooper Splain and a junior trooper, Eddie Pagan, came to her family farm and persuaded her to lure him back.

Mr. Ardo pulled up but then appeared to reverse his Buick Reatta, according to the officers’ accounts. Rather than let him go, the troopers ran out the back door and got in their two patrol cars, hidden from view. They trapped the Buick between their cruisers, hopped out and drew their firearms, the troopers told police investigators.

Within seconds, the troopers began shooting, according to Ms. Monaghan. Lawyers for Ms. Monaghan said they believe that Trooper Splain, who fired nine times, killed Mr. Ardo with the last three bullets. The troopers later said they feared for their lives, according to court filings, as Mr. Ardo, sitting in the driver’s seat, appeared to be lighting something around his neck. That turned out to be a common aerial firework.

In an interview, the dead man’s mother wondered why the officers hadn’t tried to de-escalate the situation by stepping away. “They rushed him and didn’t even give him a chance,” said Ms. Monaghan, who said she watched the confrontation from her window and later filed a wrongful-death lawsuit. She added, “They were in no way in harm’s way if they would have just backed up and left him alone.”

The review by The Times of hundreds of killings of unarmed motorists by police found that mental health crises were a recurring theme. In at least 10 cases, callers asked the police to check on the welfare of people threatening suicide or struggling from mental illness. Instead, the responding officers shot the drivers and later claimed they feared that they or someone else would be run over.

Cpl. Miller said troopers use “their discretion to assess the current situation and resources available to them for every incident.” He said the agency couldn’t comment on pending litigation.

Within an hour of Mr. Ardo’s shooting, a state police lieutenant called John Morganelli, the district attorney in Northampton County and a Democrat, to ask how the prosecutor wanted to handle the investigation, according to a grand-jury report later made public. Mr. Morganelli decided his office would take the lead and assigned a county detective.

But the lieutenant soon told Mr. Morganelli that his higher-up bosses “would not yield the criminal investigation,” the report said.

Apparently because of that dispute, no one interviewed either trooper for about a month. During that time, the two men talked to each other and watched dash-camera videos of the shooting, they acknowledged later. Law enforcement experts warn that allowing officers to share information before interviews can lead them to align their stories.

Trooper Splain disclosed his earlier fatal shooting to Trooper Pagan, both men said in depositions. “Most of the conversations revolved around him giving me advice as to how to handle the stress,” Trooper Pagan said.

State police assigned an investigator from Troop M’s major case team to lead the inquiry. Superior officers later told the grand jury that they rely on investigating troopers to report any potential conflicts of interest.

Trooper Michael Everk, the lead investigator, declined to comment for this article. He had worked with Trooper Splain on a marijuana bust, state police newsletters show. While interviewing the troopers, Trooper Everk referred to Trooper Pagan as “Eddie” several times instead of speaking more formally, as he did in other interviews.

Mr. Morganelli brought the case to a grand jury, which concluded that the shooting was justified. But the jurors also issued a second, public report accusing state police leaders of a “somewhat arrogant view of superiority” over other law enforcement agencies. The panel also found investigators gave troopers “special treatment” that is “not generally afforded to others who are the subject of a criminal investigation.”

The next year, Trooper Splain was moved to Troop L in Lebanon County.

‘The Gravest of Situations’

Pier Hess Graf, the Lebanon County district attorney, hosts an annual fund-raiser, “Back the Blue,” for a Pennsylvania nonprofit that helps the families of slain officers. Her husband is a state police corporal.

Advocates of reform say such apparent conflicts of interest highlight the need for independent, arms-length criminal investigations into killings by the police. Some police departments now call in district attorneys from neighboring counties, others have independent units to investigate fatalities. In recent years, states including California, New Jersey, and New York shifted many of these investigations to the state attorney general’s office.

But last year, Ms. Graf oversaw an investigation into another fatal shooting involving Trooper Splain. At the time, her husband was based in the same barracks.

Early on March 16, 2020, Charity Thome, 42, who had mental illness and drug addiction, fled officers after she was caught trying to break into her former home, records show.

Officer Ryan Haase of the North Lebanon Police Department started pursuing her Honda Accord; he soon told dispatchers he was ending the chase because, with few cars on the road at that hour, the woman was not endangering the public.

But then Trooper Splain and a rookie, Trooper Matthew Haber, joined him. Ms. Thome led the police on a “lengthy high-speed chase,” Ms. Graf, the district attorney, said later, with “no regard for traffic lights, signs, police sirens, other vehicles on the roadway or the safety of the general public.”

Many police departments ban high-speed pursuits of nonviolent offenders, especially if officers know who they are and can find them later. Instead, records show, Trooper Splain performed a risky maneuver to force Ms. Thome to stop.

The Accord spun out into a field. Ms. Thome then drove into Officer Haase’s S.U.V. The two troopers jumped out of their vehicle, guns drawn. “Stop, stop, get out of the car, show me your hands,” Trooper Splain recalled shouting, according to a police interview quoted in a lawsuit filed by Ms. Thome’s family.

He fired first, followed by the rookie. Ms. Thome, hit seven times, died almost instantly, according to the lawsuit.

In an April 2020 press release describing the killing, Ms. Graf, the prosecutor, said Ms. Thome “accelerated forward and drove into” the officer’s vehicle. The release also described Troopers Splain and Haber as saying they feared multiple outcomes, including Ms. Thome reversing and running over officers or continuing “to ram” the S.U.V.

But Officer Haase estimated her speed to be five miles an hour, adding that he was more worried about damage to his vehicle than about his safety, according to his interviews with police included in the lawsuit. Neither vehicle’s airbags deployed, the lawsuit said; a photograph showed that the S.U.V. sustained minimal damage.

No police commands could be heard in a dash-camera video. Trooper Splain told police 30 seconds had elapsed between his leaving the car and shooting. The video, included in the lawsuit, shows it took only a few seconds.

“Their job was to talk her out of the vehicle and into safety,” said Thomas Kline, a lawyer for Ms. Thome’s family. “And instead, they did just the opposite, which was to fire multiple rounds of bullets into her pinned-down vehicle, leaving her defenseless and tragically dead.”

Agency policy says Pennsylvania state troopers should not shoot at moving vehicles unless the driver “poses an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” or if shooting is the last resort to prevent a suspect in a violent felony from escaping.

In the release, Ms. Graf said she had assigned her detective bureau to oversee the investigation, which involved several agencies. It drew on the state police inquiry, which was led by an investigator based out of the same troop as Trooper Splain, The Times found.

Ms. Graf had determined that the shooting was justified after about a month — a relatively fast conclusion compared to similar inquiries reviewed by reporters. In response to questions from The Times, Ms. Graf didn’t address any potential conflict of interest and said she stood by her decisions.

Agency policy says Pennsylvania state troopers should not shoot at moving vehicles unless the driver “poses an imminent danger of death or serious bodily injury,” or if shooting is the last resort to prevent a suspect in a violent felony from escaping.

In the release, Ms. Graf said she had assigned her detective bureau to oversee the investigation, which involved several agencies. It drew on the state police inquiry, which was led by an investigator based out of the same troop as Trooper Splain, The Times found.

Ms. Graf had determined that the shooting was justified after about a month — a relatively fast conclusion compared to similar inquiries reviewed by reporters. In response to questions from The Times, Ms. Graf didn’t address any potential conflict of interest and said she stood by her decisions.

The 4th Killing

Andy Dzwonchyk, a 40-year-old metal worker who had once been named “loudest laugh” and voted president of his high school class, was unraveling by November.

Amy Hastings, his girlfriend of 20 years, had left, weary of his drug use. She obtained a protection order after he badgered her to come back and talked of killing himself in front of their two sons if she did not return. “Andy never threatened me or the kids,” Ms. Hastings said in an interview.

At about 10:40 p.m. on Nov. 7, Ms. Hastings called 911 because Mr. Dzwonchyk kept texting, in violation of the order. Two troopers showed up, including Jay Splain.

While Ms. Hastings talked to them, Mr. Dzwonchyk, who was caring for their sons, texted again, saying he needed a thermometer for one boy, who was sick, Ms. Hastings recalled. She went inside because it was cold. Then Mr. Dzwonchyk, who lived down the road from where she was staying, drove up.

The troopers tried to arrest Mr. Dzwonchyk in his car, but a struggle ensued, according to a police spokesman at a press conference the next morning. Trooper David Beohm said one officer had gotten caught inside the vehicle, which advanced and reversed, dragging him, although he was not injured.

“It wasn’t like a real fast back-and-forth,” Trooper Beohm said.

Mr. Dzwonchyk’s 1999 Beetle was a stick-shift, making it difficult to go forward and backward quickly. Attempts to subdue Mr. Dzwonchyk with a Taser didn’t work, according to the spokesman. Only then, he said, did the other officer fire his weapon.

That was Trooper Splain.

Julie Tate and Seamus McGraw contributed reporting.

Sickle cell trait has been cited in dozens of police custody deaths ruled accidental or natural, even though the condition is benign on its own, a Times investigation found.

By Michael LaForgia and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries

When they carried the body of a 32-year-old Black man named Lamont Perry out of the woods in Wadesboro, N.C., there were no protests over his sudden death in police custody.

No reporters camped at the scene. No lawyers filed suit.

Instead, the final mark in the ledger of Mr. Perry’s life was made by a state medical examiner who attributed his death in large part to sickle cell trait, a genetic characteristic that overwhelmingly occurs in Black people. The official word was that he had died by accident.

But the examiner’s determination belied certain facts about that night in October 2016, public records and interviews show. Accused of violating probation in a misdemeanor assault case, Mr. Perry was chased by parole and local police officers through the dark into a stand of trees, where only they could witness what happened next.

He had swelling of the brain, and a forensic investigator reported that he had an open fracture of his right leg. He was covered in dirt, and residents of a nearby housing complex told his family that when the officers emerged from the woods, their shoes and the bottoms of their pants were spattered in blood.

Mr. Perry’s case underscores how willing some American pathologists have been to rule in-custody deaths of Black people accidents or natural occurrences caused by sickle cell trait, which is carried by one in 13 Black Americans and is almost always benign. Those with the trait have only one of the two genes required for full-blown sickle cell disease, a painful and sometimes life-threatening condition that can deform red blood cells into crescent shapes that stick together and block blood flow.

As recently as August, lawyers for Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis police officer convicted last month of murdering George Floyd, invoked sickle cell trait in an unsuccessful motion to dismiss the case against him, saying that the condition, along with other health problems and drug use, was the reason Mr. Floyd had died.

The New York Times has found at least 46 other instances over the past 25 years in which medical examiners, law enforcement officials or defenders of accused officers pointed to the trait as a cause or major factor in deaths of Black people in custody. Fifteen such deaths have occurred since 2015.

In roughly two-thirds of the cases, the person who died had been forcefully restrained by the authorities, pepper-sprayed or shocked with stun guns. Scattered across 22 states and Puerto Rico, in big cities and small towns, the determinations on sickle cell trait often created enough doubt for officers to avert criminal or civil penalties, The Times found.

K.C. Cage-Singleton, a 30-year-old landscaper and father of four, was walking in Baton Rouge, La., in October 2009 when two officers approached him because they thought his clothing resembled that of an armed robbery suspect. Records show they chased him into an apartment complex, shocked him with a stun gun and beat him with a baton. The coroner cataloged a slew of injuries, including abrasions, lacerations and broken teeth, but said the manner and cause of his death were “undetermined,” citing “probable” sickle cell trait. The officers were not charged.

Army Sgt. James Brown, 26, had completed two tours in Iraq and was struggling with post-traumatic stress disorder in July 2012 when he turned himself in to the El Paso jail to serve a two-day sentence for drunken driving. The authorities said he became violent, and he died after five jailers in riot gear piled atop him, pulled a mesh mask over his head and bound him in a chair. The medical examiner ruled that he had died a natural death caused by sickle cell crisis, and a grand jury declined to bring charges.

Gamel Brown, a 30-year-old property maintenance supervisor, cut his hand on a broken mirror at his home in a Baltimore suburb in January last year, prompting a call to 911. The police who responded said he became “extremely combative,” and they jolted him several times with a stun gun. After he died at a hospital, the medical examiner said that the manner of his death was undetermined — and that it was caused in part by sickle cell trait. The state’s attorney filed no charges.

In three cases, deaths linked to sickle cell trait that were deemed natural or of indeterminate cause were later ruled homicides — as occurred when Martin Lee Anderson, 14, died at the hands of his jailers at a northwest Florida juvenile detention camp in January 2006.

“You can’t put the blame on sickle cell trait when there is a knee on the neck or when there is a chokehold or the person is hogtied,” said Dr. Roger A. Mitchell Jr., the former chief medical examiner for the District of Columbia and now chairman of pathology at the Howard University College of Medicine. “You can’t say, ‘Well, he’s fragile.’ No, that becomes a homicide.”

Not every death that is tied to the condition is inherently questionable. Medical experts say sickle cell trait has caused deaths in rare cases of extreme overexertion, especially among military trainees and college athletes. Three of the in-custody deaths identified by The Times involved people who were exercising vigorously in jail yards or running hard before they collapsed — and law enforcement officers said that at most they put handcuffs on them.

In none of the deaths examined by The Times did the person have actual sickle cell disease, though there were instances when imprecise language by medical examiners left the false impression the trait and the disease were the same.

Dr. James R. Gill, chief medical examiner in Connecticut and president of the National Association of Medical Examiners, said that pathologists would not be doing a thorough job if they identified sickle cell trait and failed to mention it in their reports.

“We know that this, in the right situation, can cause death, and you can’t just ignore that,” said Dr. Gill, who cited the trait in the autopsy of Lashano Gilbert, a 31-year-old Black man who had died in police custody in October 2014.

Mr. Gilbert, who had attended medical school, suffered a psychotic episode in New London, Conn., and was arrested after jumping on a passing car. His jailers put him in restraints, used pepper spray and a stun gun on him and fit him with a mask to prevent biting. Dr. Gill ruled the death a homicide, though the state’s attorney deemed the use of force “appropriate” and filed no charges.

In interviews, Dr. Mitchell and other medical experts agreed that the trait warranted mention in autopsies, but said any natural or accidental death attributed to it, even in part, should be scrutinized if the person died during or after a struggle with law enforcement.

Many said they suspected some sickle cell determinations might reflect a pattern of bias or conflicts of interest among medical examiners and police officials.

Forensic pathologists, the doctors who conduct autopsies for coroners and medical examiners, were singled out in a hotly disputed study published in a scientific journal in February suggesting that racial bias could influence their rulings, though it did not address sickle cell trait.

And coroners and medical examiners have entrenched relationships with law enforcement in many areas, functioning as part of police departments or working closely with them. In California, for example, the elected sheriff serves as coroner in 41 of the state’s 58 counties. Several years ago, two pathologists resigned from the coroner’s office in San Joaquin County there, citing interference by the sheriff with in-custody death reviews. The sheriff denied the claims and lost re-election.

In Mr. Perry’s case, agents with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation sealed his body in a bag before a forensic investigator inspected it. Officers at the scene could not say for sure how he had suffered his injuries, but said it appeared he had tripped and fallen into a ravine. The officers said he had been talkative when they found and handcuffed him, but then he lost consciousness. No efforts were made to revive him with lifesaving equipment when paramedics arrived, records and interviews show, and the “open fracture” documented by the forensic investigator was described in the autopsy as a “laceration.”

Mr. Perry, who was sometimes shy to the point of seeming rude, had his detractors in the neighborhood, his family members said, and records show he had a history of misdemeanor breaking-and-entering, larceny and drunken-driving convictions. The assault conviction that gave rise to the foot chase stemmed from an argument with the girlfriend he was visiting that night, family members said.

Mr. Perry had alcohol and a small amount of cocaine in his bloodstream when he died, and the medical examiner ruled that he had succumbed to “cocaine toxicity in the setting of sickle cell trait,” effectively ending any deeper inquiry. The local district attorney declined to bring charges.

“I find no evidence of any criminal activity or wrongdoing of any kind,” the district attorney, Reece Saunders, wrote in March 2017. “I consider this unfortunate matter closed.”

For Mr. Perry’s relatives, who could not afford a lawyer to challenge the ruling, all that was left was a series of unanswered questions. What had happened in the woods? Why wouldn’t the investigators let them view the body before the autopsy?

“The only people who know what happened are that probation officer and the officers who ran out there,” said Mr. Perry’s half brother, Mario Robinson. “I don’t believe what they said.”

A Nationwide Pattern

To gain a sense of how often medical examiners have used sickle cell trait to explain in-custody deaths, The Times reviewed thousands of pages of autopsy records, court filings and police reports. It examined data on suspicious deaths from more than 30 of the United States’ largest counties, whose jurisdictions cover nearly one in three Black Americans.

The review identified dozens of cases dating to the 1970s and was almost certainly an undercount. In some areas with large Black populations, like New York City, The Times relied on court cases and media reports because relevant medical or identifying data was not publicly available. Other locations, including Wayne County, Mich., which contains Detroit, did not provide the data to The Times before publication.

Many of the deaths received little outside scrutiny at the time — perhaps a brief mention in the local media — in part because the families did not have the resources to challenge official determinations, or because the detained people were not seen as particularly sympathetic. Many had histories of arrests on drug use, domestic violence or other charges, and additional evidence that might point to police misconduct, such as video footage, was often not made public.

In some cases, The Times only pieced together details of the deaths through interviews with relatives, witnesses, emergency workers and outside pathologists.

The results offer a vivid glimpse into deaths in custody. In the past 25 years, 19 cases involved Black people who died after being restrained in ways that could hinder breathing. Twelve deaths occurred after the police or sheriffs’ deputies used stun guns. Nine happened after they used pepper spray. Two followed bites from police dogs.

Five of the cases were initially ruled homicides.

The rest were labeled undetermined, accidental or natural.

In communities from California to Pennsylvania, officials cited the rulings in closing investigations into the deaths, ensuring that police agencies provided the last word on what had occurred.

David Campbell, 25, stopped breathing in Allentown, Pa., in October 2011 after resisting his jailers’ efforts to remove his clothing and put him on suicide watch. They responded by dousing him with pepper spray, jamming knees into his back and leaving him tied to a chair, according to a lawsuit brought by his family.

While the results of Mr. Campbell’s autopsy were pending, emails show, the head of the Lehigh County Corrections Department sent the coroner a video of the arrest of a Florida man whose death was attributed to “excited delirium” — a condition that pathologists say can suddenly kill drug users or the mentally ill, though they acknowledge it is poorly understood and unevenly applied.

“I found this video which appeared similar to our incident with David Campbell,” wrote the corrections chief, Edward Sweeney, “and I thought I’d share it with you as we await the toxicology report.”

The coroner’s ruling in the case stated: “excited delirium complicating sickle cell trait, dehydration and abnormalities of the cardiac conduction system during restraint.” Manner of death: “undetermined.”

Ronney Moss Jr., wanted on suspicion of smoking marijuana outside a Greyhound bus station in Atlanta, suddenly was unable to breathe in August 2012 in the presence of an Atlanta police officer after running less than two-tenths of a mile. Investigators told the Fulton County medical examiner that the officer had not restrained Mr. Moss but instead found him on the ground gasping for air. The medical examiner attributed the death of Mr. Moss, 31 and apparently in good physical condition, to natural causes, particularly sickle cell trait “following exertion.”

Jason Pierce, 40, had been held for days in July 2017 at Louisiana’s Orleans Parish jail — where two guards would later be charged with smuggling drugs and other contraband — when he died with cocaine and opiates in his system. After Mr. Pierce’s autopsy, the coroner’s office focused not on the drugs but on sickle cell trait, ruling that he had died a natural death caused by “widespread red blood cell sickling.”

A handcuffed Dean Smith, 25, told the police that he could not breathe following a foot chase in Evansville, Ind., in February last year. An officer standing over him said, “Boy, you are being overly dramatic,” according to body camera footage. Mr. Smith’s death would be recorded by the Vanderburgh County coroner as an accident prompted by sickle cell crisis and cocaine and alcohol intoxication.

Three months later, Larry Ross Jr., 37, died after state police officers arrested him in Cambridge, Md. The officers said they handcuffed Mr. Ross, who had run from his car after they stopped him for a traffic violation, without handling him roughly. The county medical examiner determined that his death was an accident caused by synthetic marijuana use, with sickle cell trait as a factor.

The Times described its findings to Simon Dyson, a British researcher who studies sickle cell conditions and deaths in custody. He said the cases follow a well-established pattern in which the trait is listed alongside other conditions, like high blood pressure or drug use, to create doubt about the role of law enforcement.

“It’s all throwing a smoke screen up around the death that makes it more difficult to effect a prosecution,” he said.

Determining whether a death is a homicide is ultimately a judgment call, though most pathologists interviewed by The Times said they applied the label if the intentional actions of one person led to the death of another — even if those actions were taken by the police and the person who died had health problems.

But not all medical examiners agree on how much another person’s actions must contribute to the death to call it homicide. Dr. Lisa Scheinin, a former deputy medical examiner in Los Angeles, who wrote a journal article in 2009 about sickle cell trait, said she had been “very hesitant” to rule in-custody deaths homicides unless the police had played an important role.

“If you call something homicide, there’s going to be all kinds of people waiting to sue you, to sue law enforcement,” Dr. Scheinin said in an interview. “We generally have to make decisions without thinking about other consequences, but sometimes you just can’t help think about that.”

A Medical Debate

Most people with sickle cell trait never suffer a symptom, though studies and experts have suggested that on rare occasions it can cause the fatal curving of blood cells in people who overexert themselves when other conditions are present — for example, hot weather, high altitude or drug use.

Dr. Bruce Mitchell, the former director of hospital medicine at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta, who has studied sudden death and sickle cell trait, said the condition had been cited in the deaths of some military recruits because they are often made to run long distances in the heat and with heavy equipment without enough training or conditioning.

Several doctors and researchers who spoke with The Times said they would be skeptical of in-custody deaths attributed to sickle cell trait, unless the situation also involved other risk factors.

“The analogy I would make would be to someone who has heart disease,” Dr. Mitchell said. “It might be true that they died because of heart disease, but, well, they probably would have lived if you hadn’t put them in a chokehold and stressed their heart.”

In at least three cases reviewed by The Times, the person was exerting himself and did not appear to interact significantly with law enforcement. In another, the environment was harsh: Darryl Daniels, 30, stopped breathing in Reno, Nev., in 1998 after taking cocaine and running for several blocks in 97-degree weather. The pathologist acknowledged that sickle cell trait was “usually benign and asymptomatic except under circumstances of extreme stress,” but wrote that the heat, activity and stimulant drugs provided that stress even before the man was arrested.

More often, The Times found, the police reported that the arrested people struggled, prompting the medical examiner to rule that their physical activity precipitated a so-called sickling crisis, when the blood cells bend into crescents and block blood vessels. In many instances, law enforcement also used control techniques that doctors said could limit oxygen enough to cause sickling and death. These included repeatedly using stun guns and pepper spray and holding people facedown with their arms behind them.

Sickle cell trait alone cannot cause death, said Dr. Swee Lay Thein, a hematologist at the National Institutes of Health who has studied the condition. “It has to be something else, and something quite extreme,” she said.

Medical experts also said it could be misleading to attribute death to the trait based on the presence of cells that have clumped or sickled — something that often happens when people with the condition stop breathing. Finding the crescent-shaped blood cells during an autopsy is to be expected, the experts said, and does not mean the cells were like that before death.

In the case of Mr. Floyd, the medical examiner in Minneapolis noted the curved cells and said he had had sickle cell trait. But the autopsy indicated that it had not contributed to his death, and there was no evidence the cells had sickled before he died. In their unsuccessful motion to dismiss the case, Mr. Chauvin’s lawyers nonetheless suggested that the trait could cause trouble breathing.

The argument echoed claims made in other cases as early as 1973, The Times found. That year, 28-year-old George Lucas died in the Cook County jail in Illinois, according to media reports at the time. Inmates testified that guards had beaten, strangled and suffocated him with a blanket, while jail officials said they had only strapped him to his bed.

But after sickled cells were found during the autopsy, the coroner said Mr. Lucas would not have died were it not for the trait, Dr. James Bowman, a pathologist who participated in the hearing, wrote in an academic article years later. The death was deemed natural and the guards were not charged. “Thus,” Dr. Bowman wrote, “the dangerous precedent for legalized murder of persons with sickle cell trait could become established.”

Seeking Answers

For decades, coroners and medical examiners have reached for answers when pressed to explain deaths of people in police custody.

One of the most prominent proponents of citing sickle cell trait was Dr. Charles V. Wetli, a pathologist who originated the idea that in-custody deaths could be caused by excited delirium.

During that chapter of his career, as a deputy chief medical examiner in Miami in the 1980s, Dr. Wetli theorized that men who died after arrest had often succumbed to the syndrome. But it was not only men who were susceptible, Dr. Wetli told reporters in 1988. Excited delirium may also have felled nine Miami women who were found dead in sexual poses, he said, in situations that might lead others to conclude that they had been raped and murdered. Nearly all the women were Black.

“For some reason, the male of the species becomes psychotic, and the female of the species dies in relation to sex,” Dr. Wetli told The Miami News at the time. That came under serious doubt about six months later, when the police arrested a man on a rape charge who they believed was a serial killer responsible for the deaths, which numbered 32 in all. The man died in prison after being convicted of the rape.

Dr. Wetli, who died in July, moved to New York in 1995 and became the chief medical examiner in Suffolk County, where he oversaw identification of the remains of victims in the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800.

In his later years, he became an outspoken backer of using sickle cell trait to explain in-custody deaths of Black people, writing a journal article with Dr. Scheinin of Los Angeles and testifying as a $450-an-hour expert witness hired by police agencies. He also acted as a paid consultant for Taser International, the maker of the stun guns cited in some of the deaths reviewed by The Times.

In 2008, Baron Pikes, known as Scooter, died after being shocked with a stun gun at least eight times by a police officer in Winnfield, La., while handcuffed and lying on the ground. The coroner ruled the death of Mr. Pikes, 21 and Black, a homicide, and the officer, Scott Nugent, was charged with manslaughter. Still, at the criminal trial, Dr. Wetli testified that “the cause of death was exertional sickling due to sickle cell trait.”

Mr. Nugent was acquitted.

The Times found other medical examiners invoking the trait as early as the 1970s.

In May 1979, Los Angeles pathologists blamed “massive intravascular sickling” in the death of Jerry Eugene Wright Jr., a 20-year-old Black man whom police officers had mistaken for a drug user. In fact, he had been the victim of a violent robbery; they handcuffed him, put him facedown on the ground and ignored bystanders who warned that he was struggling to breathe. Mr. Wright’s family was later awarded $2.1 million after suing for wrongful death.

A panel convened by a coroner outside Augusta, Ga., concluded that Larry Gardner, 33, had died of cardiopulmonary arrest caused by sickle cell trait in August 1984 after the authorities arrested him on marijuana and shoplifting charges. Mr. Gardner’s death led to rioting after it was said that he had been beaten in custody.

Authorities in Burlington County, N.J., cited sickle cell trait in the cases of two brothers who had died in police custody 15 years apart. They used it first to explain the sudden death of Sidney Miles, 20, while he was fleeing officers who sought to arrest him on a charge of driving without a license in 1984.

They cited it again when his brother, Cleathern Miles, 28, stopped breathing in 1999 after the police shot him with pepper spray and restrained him in the midst of an apparent mental breakdown — during which he was calling out his dead brother’s name. The same pathologist, Dr. Dante Ragasa, conducted both autopsies.

“There were allegations of police brutality in Sidney’s death, but that was not the case,” the acting county prosecutor, James Gerrow, told reporters in 1999. “Sadly and tragically, this mirrors what happened to Sidney.”

“There was,” he added, “no police misconduct in either case.”

Cautionary Tales

The death of Martin Lee Anderson, the 14-year-old Florida boy, shows the potential pitfalls when medical examiners rush to blame sickle cell trait.

An autopsy deemed Martin’s death to be natural, saying the trait was why he had suddenly stopped breathing in January 2006. But a later inquiry found that he had died after drill instructors at a Bay County, Fla., juvenile detention center punched and kneed him, pinned him down, pressed their fingers into pressure points and covered his mouth while forcing him to inhale ammonia.

Seven guards and a nurse were charged with manslaughter. All were acquitted, but the state agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by the family for $5 million.

The case of Derek Williams, who died in Milwaukee in July 2011, offered another cautionary tale.

The police saw Mr. Williams, 22, on a street corner and arrested him on suspicion of robbery after chasing him into the yard of a nearby home. He stopped breathing in the back seat of a patrol car. The police told the county medical examiner that he had been taken into custody “without incident,” and the medical examiner, based solely on that account, ruled that he had died a natural death caused by sickle cell crisis.

After being confronted with information reported by The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which showed, among other things, that officers had piled onto Mr. Williams during his cuffing and did not immediately respond to his pleas as he gasped for air, the county reversed itself and declared his death a homicide. Still, none of the officers were charged. Mr. Williams’s family settled a lawsuit against the city for $2 million.

The urge to elevate sickle cell trait over other factors was evident in more recent cases, too, The Times found, including when the police arrested Darren Boykin in Texarkana, Texas, in 2019.

Mr. Boykin, 23, had grown up in Ohio and gotten in trouble there for using counterfeit money to buy a gaming system, records show. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge before moving to Texarkana to live with his mother.

In August 2019, a Texarkana College employee saw him walk into an administration building and became suspicious, thinking he resembled a suspect in burglaries on campus. She called the police, who chased Mr. Boykin for about a third of a mile before an officer tackled him from behind. Mr. Boykin struggled as the officer tried to handcuff him, records show, and another officer joined to subdue him.

Mr. Boykin began showing signs of distress on the way to the jail. Patrol car footage showed him lapsing in and out of consciousness, apparently without the officer in the car taking notice, records show. “Had the officer not been paying attention to driving,” the Texas Ranger who investigated the death would tell the medical examiner, “she probably would have transported him straight to the hospital.”

The authorities realized he had stopped breathing only after he had reached the jail. They started pumping on Mr. Boykin’s chest to try to revive him, according to the investigators, and brought him to a hospital, where a doctor determined he had died.

The medical examiner noted abrasions on Mr. Boykin’s shoulder and bruising on his back, the autopsy report shows, but ruled that he had died of complications of sickle cell trait, citing the short distance he had run and the hot weather.

The manner of his death: natural.

Andrew Chavez contributed reporting, and Kitty Bennett contributed research.