Philando Castile was killed by a cop named Jeronimo Yanez 10 years ago today. Yanez was charged with manslaughter, but found not guilty just a bit less than a year later.
Since then, Philando's mother, Valerie Castile, became an activist. Much of the coverage of this 10-year anniversary has focused on her work. Ramsey County prosecutor John Choi, who brought the charges against Yanez, continues to speak at the same conferences as Castile, both of them talking about how to handle police shootings.
According to Minnesota Public Radio,
“I'm a different prosecutor today compared to what I was back then,” Choi said. “It changed me as a human being, as a prosecutor, looking at a lot of things and getting to this place where I recognized that it's not right to have the type of policing that resulted in Philando's death.”
In the ensuing years, Choi and local law enforcement departments in Ramsey County have largely moved away from the sort of pretextual stops that led to Philando being pulled over, he said. Preliminary data from a new study shows cities like St. Paul have kept those numbers low.
It has been a long 10 years since then.
- My first post on the killing, from the day after.
- My post on the not-guilty verdict.
- There was an effort to name a new training fund for cops after Philando, but that idea was voted down by ... cops.
- A peace garden has been created next to the place where he was killed.
- His family and friends created the Philando Castile Relief Foundation, which gives small personal grants to families affected by gun violence.
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