Panelists share why the murder of Henry Glover matters 18 years later

By Kelli L. Ross

WASHINGTON, DC — In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans police officers killed an unarmed Black man and burned his body behind a levee. For years, this murder was covered up by the police department until a federal investigation uncovered the crimes.

On May 2, people at the center of the investigation participated in a panel discussion, “The Jury’s Still Out: What the murder of Henry Glover tells us about police accountability and our justice system today,” at The George Washington University’s Jack Morton Auditorium. This event was co-hosted with the Equity Institute at GW and was held in conjunction with the release of Jared Fishman’s Fire on the Levee: The Murder of Henry Glover and the Search for Justice after Hurricane Katrina, which follows the federal investigation into Glover’s death and the impact of the prosecution on subsequent reforms of New Orleans Police Department. Fishman, a GW law alumni (‘04), led the prosecution team as a federal prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division.

“This case, in particular, stayed with me. Part of it is just how shocking the allegations were … part of it was the setting … part of it was the involvement of a police force notorious as one of the most corrupt and abusive in the United States. But one thing that really struck me was how many people inside our system saw wrongdoing and did nothing about it, or lied about it, or helped cover up for it,” Fishman said. “But this case is also about the people who stood up against injustice, even though it was hard, even though they feared for their lives. It's about a community that began to say, ‘this is not who we are, and we can do better.’ And it's about the efforts of countless people, some of whom are here with us today, who began figuring out how we could build that better system, and how we could do things differently.”

The panelists who joined Fishman included:

• Ashley Johnson, rookie FBI agent, who led the Bureau’s investigation of the death of Henry Glover

• Roy Austin, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General of the Civil Rights Division, who supervised litigation

• Christy Lopez, former Deputy Chief Special Litigation Section of the Civil Rights Division, who led the investigation into the New Orleans Police Department

• Anthony Scott, a reform advocate, Justice Innovation Lab (JIL) Advisor, and brother of Walter Scott, who’s murder helped spark the creation of JIL.

Through the course of the conversation, the panelists discussed what they learned from the Henry Glover case, why it still matters, and what it has taught them about how communities can solve problems facing the criminal legal system.

Both Fishman and Johnson recounted the shock and disbelief they felt when realizing the number of potential witnesses who had either lied to them during the investigation or had not intervened in the days after Katrina. 

“This case really helped me realize that there's context, and people do a lot of bad things depending on that context,” Fishman said. “And what we need to do is to build better systems to create contexts where it is easier to do the right thing and where it is impossible for injustice like this to fester.”

Lopez shared that people assume they would intervene if they see wrongdoing, but she noted that is often not the case. However, she said, “You can actually teach people to intervene when they otherwise wouldn't have, and to be more effective in their intervention so that it actually works. We want to adapt these ideas to policing. It doesn't work to be fair, unless you have a culture and a leadership that supports it, but that can be an iterative process.”

Austin stressed the importance of access to and collecting of good data.

“It is so important that you have a police chief who is willing to hand over data and work with that data,” he said. “We think public safety is our most important thing, yet our labor data is significantly better than our criminal justice data. Our fantasy football data is better than our criminal justice data. It’s the worst data that we have, and yet, we claim to care about public safety and people’s wellbeing. We have a lot of work to continue to do there, and it's taking work like what JIL [Justice Innovation Lab] is doing, it’s taking work like when ABLE [Active Bystandership for Law Enforcement] does more research, and we dig in more deeply to what the impact is. Data matters.”

Fishman agreed. He noted that for years, the only data point used in criminal justice and law enforcement was the number of years people were incarcerated. So, in founding Justice Innovation Lab, he built a data team to analyze data collected by the State Prosecutor in Charleston, South Carolina.

“We began to use their data looking at decision points that they made to count, are you doing things fair, and we found all sorts of disparities… And we began to see them say, ‘No, these outcomes, these are not who we want to be. Help us figure out how to do it. Help us understand where our system is failing.’… The fact that we were able to use numbers and to use our approach to move them forward made me think if we could do it there, we could do it anywhere.”

In agreeing that much needs to be done to create a more just system, the panelists also have hope for change.

“What makes me optimistic is young people and changing demographics,” Lopez said. “If [change] is going to happen it's going to be because of young people and because we have more Black and Latina people in positions of power and influence.”

For Scott, whose brother was killed by a North Charleston, South Carolina police officer in 2015, he’s become an agent of change in his community. At the invitation of the police chief, he has now addressed 140 new police recruits in the North Charleston Police Department.

“I figured that I could help from the inside and change the culture of policing rather than working from the outside and just being a protester,” Scott said. “So that's what I tried to do. And, that's what we're doing in Charleston.”

Johnson recounted the George Floyd protests, saying “It was a time that you didn't just see Black people protesting.  You saw the world protesting—all genders, all ethnicities across the world—who had seen an injustice, and they were not going to stand for it any longer, and they were going to make their voices heard. I think we still have a long way to go, but I do think we're moving in a direction where we have a generation or a collective generation of people who are now deciding that [injustice] is not going to be the norm.”

“When I stepped back with all of these years later, and you look at the change of culture and police department,” Fishman recounts, “[the Glover case] was a part of this change of, of calling out injustice and knowing that we can, in fact, change and move cultures. And the question now is how to do it.”

Watch the full event here.