Why Should Delaware Care?
A recent police shooting of a 19-year-old in northeast Wilmington has become one of the city’s highest-profile use-of-force cases in years. Now, a Delaware Department of Justice investigation is facing scrutiny as community members continue to call for transparency and answers about what happened.
It’s been two-and-a-half months since 19-year-old Kadir Skinner was fatally shot by Wilmington police; an incident that has since sparked protests on city streets calling for transparency from city and state officials.
But if Delaware’s history with police shooting investigations is any guide, the wait for answers could still be months away.
Skinner’s family, their attorneys, and community members gathered three weeks ago, calling for city and state officials to fully disclose the facts of the ongoing investigation, including what happened that led to the shooting and whether criminal charges will be brought against the officer who fired the fatal shot.
“Although we are tired, we are not defeated,” said Lisa Flowers, Skinner’s aunt, at an Aug. 24 rally. “We have not stopped and will not stop. We will continue to seek the truth.”
Calls from the community have raised the question of when the Delaware Department of Justice’s investigation into the shooting will be released to the public.
But Caroline Harrison, spokesperson for the Department of Justice, said she could not provide a timeline.
“Officer names, along with the full body of evidence, are released following the conclusion of the investigation,” she said.
Under Delaware law, the Department of Justice’s Division of Civil Rights and Public Trust (DCRPT) must investigate deadly-force incidents involving law enforcement officers that result in serious physical injury. The goal is to determine whether an officer’s use of force was legally justified.
If an officer’s use of force was not legally justified, the DOJ “would contemplate criminal charges” based on the facts of the case, Harrison said.
While the investigation is ongoing, investigative records, criminal records and other details generally cannot be released, per Delaware’s open law records. The law, however, does not set a specific deadline for the DOJ to complete its investigation or release its final report, which compiles all of those details and the result of whether the officer’s shooting was justified.
And while state officials remain tight-lipped, a Spotlight Delaware analysis found that similar DOJ shooting investigations were not made public until nearly a year after they took place.
To understand how the Skinner case may unfold, Spotlight Delaware reviewed every police-involved shooting investigation the DOJ has closed since 2020, both fatal and non-fatal, tracking the time between each incident and the release of the DOJ’s findings.
Skinner investigation could take months
In late July, Skinner’s attorney and family announced that they will seek $25 million from the city in a wrongful death lawsuit.
Civil rights attorney Chance Lynch told Spotlight Delaware last month that he and Skinner’s other attorneys want to wait until the investigation is released before filing their lawsuit, saying they believe the investigation may reveal “pertinent information” that could improve their case.
As of Aug. 24, Skinner’s family and lawyers had not heard an update regarding the DOJ’s investigation.
“We know that if the roles were reversed and Kadir shot and killed an officer, that video would have been released without protest, and we would see that Kadir would be charged, and the prosecution already started,” Lynch said. “What are we waiting for?”
Since 2020, Delaware’s Department of Justice has closed 22 use-of-force investigations involving police shootings, according to a Spotlight Delaware analysis of case records. The time between an incident’s occurrence and when the office released its findings has varied widely, from as little as three months to more than two-and-a-half years.
The typical investigation has taken close to 10 months.
Fatal shootings, like Skinner’s, have historically taken longer to resolve, with a typical duration of about 11 months, compared with roughly six and a half months for cases where the person survived.
The Skinner shooting, which occurred June 24, is now roughly two and a half months from that date, which is still within the range where most fatal shooting investigations are just getting underway.
Of the police-involved shooting investigations released since 2020, half were fatal.
None of the 22 investigations found that an officer had unconstitutionally used excessive or deadly force.
What happens during a use-of-force investigation?
Use-of-force investigations involve numerous steps, including officer interviews, evidence review, forensic analysis, meetings with families, consultations with attorneys and law enforcement agencies and multiple layers of internal review, Harrison said.
She noted that DCRPT, the division that conducts the investigations, is the DOJ’s smallest division. It is made up of four attorneys, four investigators, two paralegals and one victim support specialist.
Mat Marshall, DOJ director of external affairs, also noted that investigation timelines will vary for different reasons.
“Two cases that appear similar on their face, with the same number of officers and victims involved, for example, may vary wildly in the amount of evidence to be collected and processed,” he said.
A former DCRPT official, who spoke to Spotlight Delaware on the condition of anonymity, noted that when an officer-involved shooting occurs, three investigations typically unfold at once.
The officer’s own department conducts an administrative review to determine whether department policy was followed — a process that can lead to internal discipline, including termination.
Separately, two criminal investigations run in parallel: one by the police department, and one by DCRPT itself.
DCRPT does not have the ability to collect evidence or run testing on its own, so it relies on the local department to gather physical evidence first. DCRPT is briefed throughout the department’s investigation and can direct it to collect specific evidence.
The local department’s criminal investigation does not end with an opinion of whether the shooting was justified, but instead concludes once all the evidence is collected. That evidence is then handed over to DCRPT.
From there, a DCRPT investigator reviews the material and writes a report, which goes to an attorney for a first opinion. The case then moves up through the division’s director, the chief deputy attorney general, and finally Attorney General Kathy Jennings before a final decision is reached and DCRPT notifies the department and the victim’s family.
“An officer-involved shooting where someone is either killed or seriously hurt is as serious as it gets,” the former official said. “So it is handled with as much care as possible. We don’t act quickly; we act deliberately.”
The former official said they do not expect the Skinner investigation to stretch past a year, and attributed longer timelines largely to an expanded caseload.
When DCRPT was officially established in 2020, its caseload widened from just shootings involving death or injury to any use of force resulting in serious physical injury, plus deadly-force incidents where no one was hurt.
That expansion created a backlog DCRPT is still working through, though the official said the division is now moving through its more serious cases faster and is “getting closer” to the goal of resolving investigations within six months.
Policing expert weighs in
James Nolan, a West Virginia University sociology professor and former Wilmington police officer, pointed to the legal standard as one reason use-of-force investigations take time.
Police only need “probable cause” to make an arrest in a typical civilian murder case, while DOJ, by contrast, has to determine from the outset whether the evidence would meet the much higher trial standard — “beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said.
As DOJ put it in one of its reports: “the State is always cognizant that it has the burden to prove the crime(s) charged beyond a reasonable doubt, a demanding standard.”
Nolan served as a Wilmington police officer for more than a decade and has served as chief of the FBI’s Crime Analysis, Research and Development Unit.
Nolan said he could not predict how DOJ or WPD will ultimately rule on the officer’s conduct in Skinner’s case. But he said he sees policing in different areas, including Wilmington, as a broader, systemic problem of “conformity to normal practices.”
“This is the illusion that a ‘bad apple’ officer is the problem rather than ‘good apples’ conforming to violent and ineffective practices that discriminate by race,” Nolan said.
What do we know about the Skinner shooting?
Skinner was shot by Wilmington police on June 24 near Jessup and East 24th streets. Wilmington PD initially reported officers were monitoring a large gathering in the area when they saw Skinner leave a home and point a gun toward the crowd.
When officers approached him, Skinner fled on foot, according to police.
City officials later disclosed additional details, saying Skinner was shot once in the buttocks during the chase, and that officers then transported him to the hospital themselves.
Police also said they recovered a .45-caliber handgun but did not say whether Skinner was holding it when he was shot.
The officer who fired the shot, who has yet to be identified, was placed on administrative leave, according to police.
After the shooting, Skinner’s family held press conferences calling for the body camera footage of the night to be released, and community members staged protests bringing attention to the matter, with some even challenging the city official’s account of the events.
Body camera footage was publicly released three weeks after the incident.
The body camera footage of Skinner’s shooting depicted a chaotic 28 seconds between the moment the shooting officer left his vehicle to chase Skinner, in which a neighborhood dog can be seen trailing behind Skinner while he is running. The officer fired his weapon four times and handcuffed the wounded teen on the pavement of a Wilmington street.
Another three and a half minutes passed after Skinner was shot before officers placed him into a patrol car and took him to Wilmington Hospital, where he died.
A separate video also shows one officer walking to an area near the shooting along a sidewalk where the female officer would later stop and reach down. A black object is seen in the footage.
The footage released, however, does not show the moments prior to the foot chase.
The shooting has become among the state’s most closely scrutinized police use-of-force incidents since the 2015 fatal shooting of Jeremy McDole, a man who used a wheelchair, or the 2021 fatal shooting of Lymond Moses.
The Moses investigation was finalized and released about 11 months after the shooting, while the McDole shooting investigation is dated seven and a half months after the incident.
Lynch, the attorney, asserted that he believes the same accountability police and public officials place on citizens should be the same accountability placed on police officers. He is urging community members to continue to seek transparency in the case.
“Continue to say Kadir’s name, hold the mayor and city council and this police department accountable, so it doesn’t happen to their family,” Lynch said.
