The family of an 8-year-old girl who was shot and killed by police outside of a Pennsylvania high school football game reached an $11 million settlement.
The settlement was agreed to this week in federal court, two years after a shooting outside of Academy Park High School in Sharon Hill, just north of Philadelphia, left Fanta Bility dead and three others wounded.
The law firm representing Bility's family, van der Veen, Hartshorn and Levin, said it hopes the settlement brings some "measure of justice and accountability to those whose lives were forever changed."
"There is no amount of money that will ever bring Fanta back or erase the horrible tragedy of what occurred on August 27, 2021, from our minds," Fanta's mother Tenneh Kromah said in a statement to NBC Philadelphia. "We hope to move on and focus specifically on the Fanta Bility Foundation and keeping Fanta’s name and legacy alive."
The Borough of Sharon Hill said it hopes that resolving the lawsuit, can "provide those impacted a small measure of closure."
"In moving forward, we will continue to mourn with and extend our deepest sympathies to the Bility family," the borough said in a statement Thursday. "We will also continue to raise the bar by remaining committed to improving and implementing policies to protect against this type of tragedy, and working diligently to ensure the safety of Sharon Hill residents while restoring public confidence and trust."
The Delaware County District Attorney's Office had said that teenagers had opened fire at each other during an argument, prompting three officers stationed nearby to fire their weapons.
Fanta was killed by a single gunshot wound to her torso. District Attorney Jack Stollsteimer said that authorities had determined that it was police gunfire that killed the girl.
The three officers, Devon Smith, Sean Dolan, and Brian Devaney, were fired by the department and charged with voluntary manslaughter, involuntary manslaughter and reckless endangerment in the Aug. 27, 2021 shooting. They pleaded guilty in November 2022 to 10 counts each of reckless endangerment. Under the negotiated pleas, the charges of manslaughter and involuntary manslaughter were dismissed. In May, they were sentenced to five years of probation.
Prosecutors had said that the plea deal was reached in consultation with Fanta's family.
The settlement resolves three separate lawsuits against the Borough of Sharon Hill, the attorneys for Fanta's family said in a statement. Nine plaintiffs are a part of the settlement.
Taxpayers need to be forced to pay for the consequences of the decisions of voters. The taxpayer is not a victim here.
The victim is a little girl and her family that will be forever shattered and never made whole.
The taxpayer let this happen by hiring incompetent goons and then not punishing them properly when they fuck up. If the taxpayer feels like this shouldn't happen then maybe the taxpayer should do something about the actual problem rather than complain about the cost of cleaning it up.
This kind of blame shifting feels like when oil companies say it's all our individual duties to clean up the planet wide ecological disaster they made by us being good little recyclers. The police problem is a national one and a historical one that doesn't have to do with hiring "bad cops."
Maybe that's your point? Is this a whoosh moment and you're being sarcastic? I can't really fathom your reasoning otherwise.
well I guess in a way the voters elected politicians that allow the oil companies to peddle that bullsit in advertisements. So I think they are advocating for greater voter involvement. Which sounds good on the surface, but has extreme barriers to happening. In the end probably only a revolution can remove the barriers and get a new system in place. But would it be any better? So I guess the logical equivalent is that they are saying we are shouting at the wind.
By your argument, the girl's family are not the victims as they are taxpayers and presumably, voters.
Even if you're going to blame the voters for not intuiting that their voted official is corrupt and going to do future dastardly deeds or being at fault for a police officer that was hired and not elected, I don't feel your logic fits here. Unless you just mean that everyone is at fault, always and for everything until they are the unlucky ones at which time they are victims and no longer to blame.
At some point the payouts for settlement impact taxpayers enough that the community paying these settlements demands change.
Or the outcry is enough that you at least start to see some kind of step in the right direction like this very lukewarm response to public concerns about careless shootings of pet dogs, which is at least something other than a direct denial or silence.
There is also the Cahoots program and others like it (as a category I think it's called "alternative dispatch programs" or similar), which have demonstrated benefits. This, by the way, is IMO what defund the police more or less was intended to communicate, for most non-abolitionists. (In reply to your original question.)
In broad strokes, I don't see any other alternatives that don't start with lots more police killings (edit: to clarify, I mean killings by police) and years of protests.
I think we're all open to ideas on how we can help, please share if you have any.
I've heard police needing they're own insurance and a database of the shitty ones, but I haven't heard anything else. Throwing around that it's the taxpayer's fault is ridiculous. The police did this.
Severely narrowing qualified immunity would allow officers to be directly sued for much more of their misconduct. You could then make them carry malpractice insurance, leveraging the indefatigable might of the insurance industry to bring some form of accountability tracking to prospective officers.
Removing internal affairs departments from police departments and making them civilian managed has proven to work very effectively provided the civilian review board has any power to punish the officers without the consent of the police.
Prosecuting law enforcement corruption with specific prejudice should be the model going forward. They should not get reduced time or extra consideration for wearing the badge, that badge should disqualify them from any presumption of acting in good faith when they have broken the law.
The taxpayer and more directly the voter has an obligation to demand politicians that are willing to reform the police. Until the taxpayer is willing to vote for somebody who thinks the need for police oversight is more important than broken windows policing the taxpayer is on the hook for the consequences of that very poor decision.
I think it sucks that ee have to pay so much extra because so many of our compatriots are boot licking shitheads, but the alternative is to not have any corrective measure to punish the party that has agency to make a change.
They need to take these settlements out of the police budgets, or better yet, police pensions. I bet once their money is threatened, they’ll get themselves in line.
They won't get themselves in line but they will try much, much harder to cover stuff up.