Reconstruction of July 14, 2018 fatal Chicago Police shooting of Harith Augustus via Forensic Architecture
On July 14, 2018, a young, white Chicago police officer, Dillan Halley, shot and killed Harith Augustus, a 37-year-old Black barber, on 71st Street in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.
Augustus was stopped by Chicago Police on suspicion that he was carrying a weapon. He was engaged in conversation by Quincy Jones, a Black veteran patrol officer with the Chicago Police Department (CPD)..
Augustus was carrying a gun. He had a license to own it. Illinois allows “concealed-carry” of firearms with additional permits, but Augustus did not have a concealed-carry permit.
As Augustus spoke calmly with Jones and began to take his FIO card from his wallet, he was approached from behind by three white CPD rookies, who surrounded him. Eventually, one of the three, Officer Megan Fleming, grabbed Augustus from behind to “establish control.”
Augustus bolted and ran, with his back to the knot of police on the sidewalk. After two or three strides, his shirt rode up, revealing the gun on his hip, and his hand moved to the area of the gun. One interpretation could be that he was reaching to steady it as he ran; another could be that he was reaching to draw the weapon.
Officer Halley believed it was the latter.
One step further along, Augustus’ escape route was blocked for an instant (apparently coincidentally) by a moving police car. In the act of avoiding the car, Augustus turned his upper body back toward the police on the sidewalk.
Officer Halley fired five times, killing Augustus.
Augustus lay dead on the street, his FIO card, not his gun, in his hand. Another CPD officer, James Aimers, approached the body, applied handcuffs, then vigorously cleaned his own hands with sanitizer.
The event was a paradigmatic “split-second” police decision to shoot.
The Chicago Police and the local civilian oversight agency concluded that the shooting was “within policy.” It seems (to me, anyway) very unlikely that anyone would conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Halley’s decision to fire was criminal.
You don’t have to accept my narrative or conclusions (in fact, they are here mainly just to put my own cards on the table).
Instead, watch this—a meticulous reconstruction by The Invisible Institute and Forensic Architecture of the fatal encounter.
That reconstruction breaks the shooting down into milliseconds, and shows the scene from numerous angles. It is a resource readers should want to review.
It provides a comprehensive documentation of a “lawful but awful” police shooting.
There’s no one to hang, but could it have been avoided?
Will we avoid it next time?
Within the Split Second
Once a police shooting is categorized as belonging to the “split second decision” genre, a consensus fatalism takes over: tragically, stuff happens.
Nothing to see here. As Chicago’s police commissioner put it on release of one selected video, “The video speaks for itself.”
But the Augustus shooting illuminates the perversity of that reaction.
The first thing that the Forensic Architecture reconstruction shows us is the utter futility of trying to understand this death by focusing entirely within the “split-second.”
Safety experts, like retired U.S. Forest Service safety director Ivan Pupilidy, would tell us that during that period all of the cops were involved in a process of “sensemaking”—an attempt to cope with a sudden torrent of unexpected and contradictory information under conditions of extreme stress.
That was true of Officer Halley. And, as painful as it is to say, that was true of Harith Augustus too. Whatever else it is, the Augustus shooting is poignant testimony to the potential of human error.
If the goal was to limit violence and preserve life, both men failed.
The question that remains is: Were they “set up to fail”?
There may be not much to learn from inside the split second, but that tells us there is a lot to learn from its context.
Before the Split Second
By now, a Hall of Fame roster of commentators has pointed out that a fatal police shooting cannot be understood as the independent work of a trigger-happy “bad apple.”
Authorities on policing, including the University of Cambridge’s Lawrence Sherman, the University of Missouri at St. Louis’ David Klinger, and the University of Michigan’s David Thacher, join legal scholars such UCLA’s Joanna Schwartz and the University of Virginia’s Barbara Armacost in arguing that officer-involved shootings have to be understood as “system crashes” or “organizational accidents.”
They emerge from complex systems under acute stress, not as the isolated acts of the lone triggermen.
In these events hiring, training, assignment, supervision, equipment, communications, racial biases, cultural expectations, cognitive limitations, and other elements play roles—not as mechanical Newtonian components that work or fail with inevitable consequences, but as conditions and influences that interact and bend the probabilities.
You see in the Forensic Architecture reconstruction, for example, the contrasting behaviors of the calm veteran officer Jones, and the hyped-up novices, Fleming and Halley.
Still from bodycam video of July 14, 2018 police shooting of Harith Augustus in Chicago via Invisible Institute, used to reconstruct incident by Forensic Architecture.
Race aside, we expect our novices to follow the rules and do what is expected; we expect our experts to innovate and adapt to surprises. We saw a mix of experts and novices here.
Who assigned them? Why? Which group controlled the incident? Why? Who made that decision? When? Why?
If the shooting was “within policy” was it a good policy to follow?
Ask those questions and you start to see that we need to widen the focus on these incidents beyond the “split-second,” and even beyond the police and their policies.
One of the things we see playing out in the Augustus shooting is an artificial, socially constructed dichotomy between Us/Here and Them/There when it comes to the South Side.
For the young cops like Fleming and Halley the mission is one of Control as an end in itself, not Control as a (sometimes) useful step towards the goal of Safety.
Aggression, Not Respect
Their attitude is one of aggression, not respect.
Fleming probably would never have peremptorily grabbed one of Us/Here from behind. If Officer James Aimers found one of Us, wounded on the streets Here, it would have provoked him to look for a pulse, not to fasten the handcuffs.
Apparently, when you are There, different rules apply. But where did the cops learn that?
If Officer Halley was “set up to fail,” tight focus on the “split-second” narrative guarantees that the public never knows it.
The people who set Halley up will never have to give an account—even to themselves—of their contributions.
People invoke the “split-second” categorization of a shooting to shield frontline cops from unfair, punitive second-guessing.
But prosecutorial discretion has proven to be ample (or more than ample) protection against criminal prosecution of police in these situations.
And, as Prof. Joanna Schwartz has shown, the cop is almost invariably indemnified for any money damages. Payments (if any) don’t even come from the Department, but from the general, tax-funded city government.
If a jury does award damages, it is acting as proxy for its fellow taxpayers—it’s their money to give.
The Invisible Institute’s Jamie Kalven shows in his several careful anatomies of the Augustus shooting and its aftermath in The Intercept that the conventional “split-second” typology constitutes an artificial structure built to serve other purposes.
Kalven documents the birth of a stylized police narrative within minutes of the shooting. Kalven then traces, step by step, its nourishment through months of tactical press releases and selective withholdings of body-cam footage.
Many of the authors who contributed to the resulting fiction (“He points a gun; the cop shoots; simple as that”) may have been motivated by their sense that a fellow cop is exposed and vulnerable.
But the impact of the conventional “split-second” narrative is that it systematically buries every fact indicating that the cop was “set up to fail.”
It functions to protect those who set him up.
Under the guise of protecting Halley, the system, its leaders, and its weaknesses, are hiding behind him.
Don’t Tell, Don’t Learn, Don’t Care
This reflex in the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting does no favors to frontline cops.
In fact, by gutting the “forward-looking accountability” that would identify the system weaknesses that affect frontline life, the “split-second” mantra leaves the people on the frontlines more vulnerable.
One price this frontline cop has paid—and the next cop dropped into one of these situations will pay—the lasting trauma intrinsic to the killing of another human—cannot be indemnified. It will haunt Halley and affect his family for the rest of his life.
In fact, the pretense that the cop’s act was essentially automatic and unavoidable, visited on the cop solely by the dead man’s actions, ignores this trauma’s existence. The impact of the situation that the system fostered on officer wellness is denied by the conventional schematic presentation. It leaves the next cop just as vulnerable—maybe more vulnerable.
From the perspective of the South Shore community the actions of Officer James Aimers must be as disturbing as Officer Halley’s.
Halley made a mistaken instantaneous decision.
But Aimers calmly took his time, studied the local barber dead on the pavement, then washed his hands and walked away.
The system’s reaction emulates Aimers’ and can’t help but accelerate the alienation between the system and the people. In effect, it says, “He’s dead, and we don’t care: we’re washing our hands.”
The alternative to this is to do what cities like Tucson and Seattle have done: build the capacity for all-stakeholders, non-blaming, “sentinel event reviews” that focus on learning. Cut the numbers of these encounters; improve the odds of safe outcomes when they can’t be avoided.
James Doyle
Show that you’re working for everyone’s Safety, not for Control of a subject population.
There is really only one question to ask about incidents like the shooting of Harith Augustus: “Do you want this to happen again?”
James M. Doyle is a Boston defense lawyer and author, and a regular columnist for The Crime Report. He welcomes comments from readers.
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