Days before the anniversary of the night an Akron police officer shot and killed her son, Jazmir Tucker’s mother filed a federal civil rights lawsuit alleging the killing was unconstitutional and made possible by systemic misconduct and racial bias upheld by the Akron Police Department and City of Akron leaders.
“On November 28, 2024, Officer [Davon] Fields shot and killed Jazmir Tucker without legal justification, without probable cause, and in the absence of any immediate threat, in violation of clearly established Fourth Amendment law,” the lawsuit says.
The shooting outside of an Ellet bar earlier this month, it says, “further establishes that Akron’s unconstitutional training and supervision deficiencies were not aberrational or confined to a single officer, but instead reflect a systemic failure and predictable result of the City’s deliberate indifference.”
Officer Davon Fields shot Tucker three times with a high-powered rifle — including in his back twice and arm once — after Tucker attempted to run away from the officer in front of Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts on East Avenue. Fields and his partner were initially attempting to investigate the sound of gunshots from a nearby field.
Fields, in his city-supervised interview with state criminal investigators, claimed he shot Tucker because he reached for a gun to shoot other responding officers. But Tucker’s gun was zipped away in a jacket pocket, a revelation discovered only after officers waited more than seven minutes to approach the dying teenager.
A grand jury declined to indict Fields for murder last month.
Suit claims Tucker’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated
The civil lawsuit, filed on Monday afternoon on behalf of Tucker’s mother, Ashley Green, names Fields, Fields’ partner, 10 unnamed officers, their supervisors, Police Chief Brian Harding, Mayor Shammas Malik and the City of Akron as defendants.
It alleges Tucker’s Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment rights were violated, that Fields’ supervisors were involved in the constitutional violations, that the city failed to properly train its officers, that the killing also violated state law, and that Tucker suffered greatly in the moments leading up to his death.
In addition to compensation, the suit seeks to reform the department’s training and supervision practices along with its accountability procedures.
Much of the lawsuit focuses on Fields’ training, which is “overwhelmingly dominated by courses providing training in high-risk, military-style encounters” and is “unfortunately (but predictably) deficient in de-escalation, ordinary patrol policing or dealing with juveniles, the mentally ill, unarmed subjects, or fleeing suspects. Fields’ training environment was oriented toward high threat ‘shoot/no-shoot’ framing which clearly increased the risk of Fields’ escalation.”
Training records for Fields obtained last year by Signal Akron show that a vast majority of his training sessions focused on SWAT tactics and firearms, with little focus on routine police actions.
“Fields’ overall ‘warrior-style training’ without compensating de-escalation training created a foreseeable reckless risk of defaulting to lethal force under stress,” the lawsuit says. “The training deficiencies were directly reflected in Fields’ actions during his encounter” with Tucker last year because he immediately chose his high-powered rifle, didn’t activate his body camera, didn’t attempt to de-escalate the encounter, repeatedly fired “at a fleeing child,” and waited a long time to attempt medical aid.
Malik, Harding, the city and the supervisors named in the suit either participated in, ratified or condoned the constitutional violations, the lawsuit says. The complaint highlights that, in the 40 police killings by Akron police officers in the last 25 years, more than half of those killed were Black, despite Black people making up less than one-third of the city’s population.
The complaint highlights the overtly racist Signal 44 newsletter that officers created in the late 1990s and circulated around APD and how none of the officers involved faced any discipline for it.
The lawsuit was filed by attorneys Robert Gresham and Michelle Wright from the Dayton law firm Wright & Schulte and Stanley Jackson, a Beachwood attorney for the Cochran Firm.
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