Benjamin Crump was born on October 10, 1969 in Lumberton, North Carolina. The oldest of nine siblings, he was raised by his grandmother in North Carolina and went to high school in Florida. Crump then attended Florida State University (FSU), where he obtained a B.A. in Criminal Justice in 1992 and a Juris Doctor degree in 1995.
Crump was an FSU undergraduate and the head of the school’s Black Student Union when he first met the man who would eventually become his business partner, Daryl Parks. After attending law school together, the pair co-founded a personal-injury law firm named Parks and Crump in 1996. Several multi-million-dollar cases and settlements helped both their careers gain traction quickly.
Over the course of his years practicing law, Crump has frequently defended black individuals claiming to have been wronged by police officers: “I try as sincerely as possible to give a voice to those who have no voice,” he explains. In a similar vein, the slogan of Crump’s law firm is: “We help David fight Goliath.” After serving as a lawyer for African Americans in numerous high-profile civil-rights cases during his early years as a litigator, Crump was dubbed by many activists and media outlets as “Black America’s Attorney General.”
Crump has credited the leftwing jurist and first black Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall as the inspiration for his decision to pursue a legal career. Recalling a day when his mother had told him that Marshall, in his days as an NAACP lawyer, had successfully argued the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, Crump said in 2020: “From that day to this one, my objective has been to try to give people who are marginalized and disenfranchised a better shot at the American dream.” “The one thing that motivates me is that Thurgood Marshall is my personal hero, my North Star,” Crump said on another occasion. “I think about how daunting it was for Marshall and our ancestors, but they never gave up hope.”
Crump expanded upon that same theme in 2022:
“I often hear all kinds of criticisms. And I think about my personal hero, my personal heroes, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and Fannie Lou Hamer … I’m not in this [business] for a popularity contest. Every morning I wake up, I understand what my mission in life is. And that is to be an unapologetic defender for black life, black liberty, and black humanity. And I am not afraid to speak truth to power. And if this was any other group, where they were killing their children unjustly, shame on them if they didn’t stand up too. So I don’t care what anybody has to say, with criticism of what we’re fighting for, we’re fighting for the very lives and the future of our children.”
Crump’s first high-profile case was in 2002, when he represented the family of Genie McMeans, Jr., a 23-year-old black Florida man who was shot and killed by Kreshawn Walker-Vergenz, a rookie female trooper with the Florida Highway Patrol (FHP), on May 9 of that year. On that fateful day, McMeans was a passenger in a car driven by his friend, Saul Ticona, who later reported that McMeans had been acting strangely and had grabbed the steering wheel at one point while Ticona drove along Interstate 10. Alarmed by McMeans’ reckless behavior, Ticona, when he saw the FHP car’s flashing lights on the side of the road, pulled over and told Walker-Vergenz, who had just written a speeding ticket: “My friend is trying to kill us.”
A Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) report details what happened next:
“Trooper Walker-Vergenz was accosted by the passenger McMeans. McMeans exited the passenger side of the vehicle, shouting ‘BOOM,’ and came at the trooper with his hands fully visible and empty handed. Trooper Walker-Vergenz was able to gain command of McMeans at gunpoint by ordering him to the ground beside the vehicle. After several seconds of lying on the ground, McMeans returned to the standing position and again came at Trooper Walker-Vergenz with his hands fully visible and empty handed, but reaching out towards the trooper and screaming ‘aaahhhhh.’ Trooper Walker-Vergenz began retreating while pointing her firearm at McMeans and commanding him to stop. McMeans then turned and began walking back to the open doorway of the vehicle with Trooper Walker-Vergenz still commanding him to stop. However, upon his failure to stop, Trooper Walker-Vergenz then fired once with her FHP-issued 40 caliber Beretta pistol and struck McMeans once in the right back while he was walking away. Upon being shot the first time, McMeans re-entered the vehicle, sat for several seconds and then again exited. McMeans again came at Trooper Walker-Vergenz in the same manner as previous. Trooper Walker-Vergenz again commanded McMeans to stop, and upon his failure to do so, she fired and struck McMeans in the chest area. McMeans continued to advance in the same manner and was again shot. Trooper Walker-Vergenz continued to command McMeans to stop, and upon his failure to stop, she shot him once more in the chest area. McMeans then collapsed onto the grassy shoulder of the roadway.”
Though a subsequent grand jury hearing cleared the trooper of any criminal charges, Benjamin Crump vowed to press the U.S. Justice Department to investigate the shooting, and he announced that a wrongful-death lawsuit would be filed by the McMeans family.
A decade later, Crump garnered national attention for his involvement in the infamous trial of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African American who was shot to death by local neighborhood-watch volunteer George Zimmerman following their altercation late on the night of February 26, 2012 in Sanford, Florida. Several friends of the Martin family urged the latter to hire Crump to represent them in their effort to bring Zimmerman to justice, and indeed they did enlist Crump’s aid in April 2012. “I told them that I would consider it once Zimmerman was arrested,” Crump later told the media. “….I just knew the police would arrest him based on what we knew about the case. But by the end of that week, he wasn’t arrested. It became clear that this was an outrage and the family needed legal representation….I spoke with Trayvon’s father and I heard the sadness in his voice. I knew I had to get involved.”
Moreover, Crump enlisted the support of activist Al Sharpton to increase media coverage of Martin’s death. “If they’re trying to sweep it under the rug…don’t let ’em,” Crump said to civil-rights activists at the time. A jury ultimately acquitted Zimmerman of second-degree murder charges in July 2013, concluding that he had acted in self-defense. Immediately after the acquittal, Crump eulogized Martin and likened him to two African Americans who had been slain by white killers decades earlier: “Trayvon Martin will forever remain in the annals of history next to Medgar Evers and Emmett Till as symbols for the fight for equal justice for all.”
Crump also spoke at a New York City rally calling for a federal civil-rights investigation into George Zimmerman. The gathering attended by more than 1,000 people, including such luminaries as Jay-Z and Beyonce. Said Crump to the crowd: “Are we going to let any neighborhood watchdog with a 9mm gun follow our children?… We have to unite. Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, we all have to come together and say, ‘We need common-sense laws.’”
In 2012 as well, Crump was hired to legally represent Ronald Weekley Jr., a 20-year-old black man who in August 2012 accused Los Angeles Police Department officers of having used unreasonable, racially motivated physical force when they apprehended him for skateboarding on the wrong side of the road on Sixth Avenue in Venice, California. “Was he stopped because he was on the wrong side of the road, or was he attacked because he was the wrong color?” Crump asked rhetorically at that time.
A close examination of the facts shows that Weekley himself did a great deal to escalate tensions and provoke the officers at the scene. As The Los Angeles Times reported: “LAPD officials said that officers tried to stop Weekley … because he was riding his skateboard on the wrong side of the street. He attempted to flee, and officers used force to handcuff and subdue him, they said.” As the situation unfolded, Weekley was arrested not only for resisting arrest, but also for three outstanding warrants related to curfew violations, bicycle-riding infractions, and driving an automobile without a license. The suspect subsequently filed a civil-rights lawsuit against the aforementioned officers as well as the City of Los Angeles, but in June 2014 a federal jury unanimously rejected the suit and cleared all the defendants of any wrongdoing.
Also in 2012, Crump represented the family of Alesia Thomas, who on July 22 had left her two children, ages 12 and 13, at the LAPD’s Southeast station, telling officers there that she was unable to care for the youngsters. When police later went to Thomas’s home to question her about this matter, they arrested her on suspicion of child endangerment. In addition, they subsequently reported that: (a) Thomas was high on cocaine when they had arrived at her residence; and (b) as the officers had attempted to take the woman into custody, she began “violently” resisting arrest, thereby making it necessary to place her in a “hobble restraint device” where her ankles were tied to her cuffed hands.
After Ms. Thomas subsequently died while in police custody that same day, Crump accused the officers at the scene of being directly responsible for her death. The attorney for Officer Mary O’Callaghan, who was one of the police at the scene, claimed that the use of physical force against Thomas was “reasonable” and “necessary” because: (a) she had disobeyed the officers’ orders, and (b) she was more than six feet tall and posed a potential physical threat. In June 2015, Officer O’Callaghan was found guilty of felony assault, not murder. According to The Guardian: “The LA county coroner said it was impossible to determine whether the altercation played a role in her death and said that cocaine intoxication was probably ‘a major factor’.”
In 2014, Crump was hired to represent the family of Ferguson, Missouri’s Michael Brown, an 18-year-old African American who committed a strongarmed robbery of a convenience store on August 9 and then — in an altercation that set off a massive wave of protests and race riots in a number of U.S. cities — was shot and killed by a white police officer named Darren Wilson. The angry mobs that took part in the riots claimed that Brown had been shot in the back while fleeing from the officer, at which point the teen had allegedly stopped and raised his hands in surrender, begging Wilson, to no avail, to refrain from firing any more rounds at him. The principal source of this narrative was Michael Brown’s 22-year-old friend, Dorian Johnson, who was with Brown at the time of the latter’s fatal encounter with Officer Wilson. After Brown’s death, Johnson told reporters that “me and my friend was walking down the street, wasn’t causing any harm to nobody,” at which point a “white cop” pulled up in his patrol car and “reached his arm out the window and grabbed my friend around his neck [and] was trying to choke my friend.” When Brown then attempted to flee, said Johnson, he was “shot like an animal” by the officer. As Breitbart.com reported: “Crump was instrumental in the propagation of the ‘hands up, don’t shoot’ hoax…, publicly stating that ‘there’s no doubt’ evidence would show police officer Darren Wilson shot 18-year-old Michael Brown with his [Brown’s] hands raised in surrender.”
On August 17, 2014, the Brown family released a statement that said: “There is nothing based on the facts that have been placed before us that can justify the execution style murder of their child by this police officer [Darren Wilson] as he [Michael Brown] held his hands up, which is the universal sign of surrender…. The police strategy of attempting to blame the victim will not divert our attention from … this brutal execution of an unarmed teenager.”
On August 20, a local grand jury consisting of three blacks and nine whites—roughly approximating the racial composition of Ferguson as a whole—began hearing evidence in an effort to determine whether Officer Wilson should be criminally indicted for the killing of Michael Brown. One of the witnesses who testified before that grand jury was Wilson himself, who told the jurors that:
Throughout the fall of 2014, supporters of Michael Brown and his family continued to indicate that no amount of exculpatory evidence would be sufficient to convince them that Officer Wilson should not be held criminally liable for the young man’s death. On October 28, for instance, as the grand jury entered the final phase of its investigation, Benjamin Crump made it clear that neither the family members nor their backers would be persuaded by any autopsy report or eyewitness statements that supported Wilson’s position. “The family has not believed anything the police or this medical examiner has said,” Crump declared.
On November 24, 2014, the grand jury probe into the Michael Brown case drew to a close. After having met on 25 separate days over a three-month period, and having heard more than 70 hours of sworn testimony from approximately 60 people including eyewitnesses as well as medical and firearms experts, the jurors elected not to indict Officer Wilson. Their decision was based on a series of key findings such as these:
After the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Wilson, Crump announced that he would be working with Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and the NAACP to push for federal legislation named the “Michael Brown Law,” which would mandate that all police officers thenceforth be required to wear body cameras while on duty.
In March 2015, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced that — after an extensive investigation of physical, ballistic, forensic, medical, autopsy, and eyewitness evidence — it had decided not to prosecute Officer Wilson for any civil-rights violations. That announcement was accompanied by an 86-page DOJ report that stated, among other things:
Crump also chose to represent the family of Tamir Rice, yet another young black male who was shot and killed by a white police officer. The chain of events that led to Rice’s death began on the afternoon of November 22, 2014, when Cleveland Police received a call from a man outside of a local recreation center who said, “I’m sitting in the park … There’s a guy here with a pistol, pointing it at everybody. The guy keeps pulling it in and out of his pants, it’s probably fake, but you know what? He’s scaring the shit out of people.” The suspect in question was Rice, a 12-year-old whose five-foot-seven, 195-pound frame made him look considerably older. His gun was an Airsoft pellet gun, a replica of a Colt M1911 semi-automatic pistol, indistinguishable from the real thing.
As the two responding officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, slowly approached Rice with their police vehicle, they repeatedly shouted, “Show me your hands!” But the boy failed to comply, so they shot him. When investigators subsequently questioned Officer Loehmann about the incident, he testified:
“I kept my eyes on the suspect the entire time. I was fixed on his waistband and hand area. I was trained to keep my eyes on hands, because ‘hands may kill.’ The male appeared to be over 18 years old and about 185 pounds. The suspect lifted his shirt and reached down into his waistband. We continued to yell, ‘Show me your hands!’ I was focused on the suspect. Even when he was reaching into his waistband, I didn’t fire. I was still yelling the command, ‘Show me your hands!’ I observed the suspect pulling the gun out of the waistband with his elbow coming up. Officer Garmback and I were still yelling, ‘show me your hands,’ with his hands pulling the gun out and his elbow coming up. I knew it was a gun and it was coming out. I saw the weapon in hands coming out of his waistband, and the threat to my partner and myself was real and active.”
Loehmann said he then fired two rounds at Rice, trying to direct his shot towards the gun in the boy’s hand. Rice died the next day in a hospital.
In May 2015, Rice’s family filed a wrongful-death suit against the City of Cleveland and against Officers Loehmann and Frank Garmback, alleging that they had acted “unreasonably, negligently, [and] recklessly.” “It is so sad that the face of police brutality in America is going to be the 12-year-old face of Tamir Rice,” declared Benjamin Crump.
But a Cleveland grand jury declined to indict the officers, primarily on the grounds that Rice was drawing what appeared to be an actual firearm from his waist as they arrived. “Given this perfect storm of human error,” said prosecutor Tim McGinty, “mistakes and communications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police. It is likely that Tamir, whose size made him look much older and who had been warned his pellet gun might get him into trouble that day, either intended to hand it over to the officers or show it, or show them it wasn’t a real gun. But there was no way for the officers to know that, because they saw the events rapidly unfolding in front of them from a very different perspective.”
Notably, Crump’s relationship with Tamir Rice’s surviving family members deteriorated quickly and dramatically after Crump became involved in the case. “My attorneys did not discuss many major strategic decisions with me about the civil and criminal matters involving my son,” Ms. Rice said in a 2015 court filing. “This upset me greatly.” And in a statement which she issued six years later, Ms. Rice denounced the Black Lives Matter movement generally and Crump specifically, saying: “[They] need to step down, stand back, and stop monopolizing and capitalizing [off] our fight for justice and human rights. In the case of Tamir Rice, it was even questionable as to whether Benjamin Crump knew the laws in the state of Ohio. I fired him 6-8 months into Tamir’s case.”
Crump was also hired to represent the family of Antonio Zambrano-Montes, a 35-year-old illegal alien from Mexico who was shot and killed by police in Pasco, Washington, while he was hurling rocks at them on February 10, 2015. Three officers at the scene – two whites and one Hispanic — initially attempted to use a Taser stun gun against the suspect, but the device had no effect on him. The shooting was captured on video by a nearby witness. “At the heart of the matter is what’s going on with what we see on that video – is it appropriate or not?” Crump told The Associated Press in the wake of the killing. “The No. 1 thing they [the Zambrano-Montes family] said is, ‘We don’t want them [the authorities] to say that the police acted appropriately.”
According to police documents, autopsy toxicology tests indicated “presumptive positive for amphetamines” in Zambrano-Montes’ system at the time of his death. Moreover, investigative documents stated that one witness claimed to have heard Zambrano-Montes tell police, “You’re gonna shoot me, shoot me.” On September 3, 2015, Zambrano-Montes’ family filed a federal lawsuit against the city and the three officers involved. But in light of the extenuating circumstances – the offender’s violent, drug-influenced behavior — no charges were brought.
In March 2015, Crump authored an online piece in USA Today in which he lamented the “insensitive, unconcerned and uncompassionate American legal system,” wherein “unarmed people of color” were routinely and “needlessly killed during interactions with law enforcement.”
In February 2016, Time published an article by Crump in which he decried the Michigan state government’s handling of the ongoing Flint water crisis – a crisis that had begun early in 2014 when Flint’s political leaders decided that in order to save money for the financially bankrupt city, they would: (a) stop using Lake Huron as Flint’s primary source of water, and (b) instead use the Flint River, which was notorious for its heavy pollution. “After the switch,” Crump wrote, “the residents of Flint began to complain to city officials and leaders that their tap water was discolored and foul-smelling, and that they were also beginning to suffer from outbreaks of skin rashes. State officials responded that the water was safe and minimized their complaints.” Crump saw this as part of a larger problem of widespread societal racism, writing:
“I am deeply appalled at the lack of accountability and insensitivity of the governor and other elected officials in Michigan. I am further sickened and disgusted that charges have not been filed against all of the leaders who failed to investigate the complaints of citizens, made the decision to transition the city’s water supply from Lake Huron to the Flint River, and were in a position of trust,yet endangered the Flint residents. …
“It is truly disturbing that these leaders have not been required to answer for their offenses against the residents of Flint, who have been permanently harmed by their reckless and wanton decisions. Somewhere in America there is a black man or woman serving a lengthy prison sentence for a non-violent drug crime, yet we allow public officials to poison an entire community and then move freely with no repercussions.
“If this was ISIS who poisoned 100,000 Americans, we would call it ‘A Crime Against Humanity’ or ‘An Act of Terrorism,’ and we would pool all of our resources to swiftly bring them to justice. An apology, such as the one given by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder, is simply not enough.
“We must come to the realization that without real consequences, there will be no real change…. We continue to see the ugly head of implicit racial bias that has consistently permeated our justice system, now permeating the drinking water supply decisions in Flint.”
In 2016, Crump represented the family of Terrence Crutcher, a black Oklahoman who was killed by police on September 16 of that year. The incident began to unfold when Tulsa Police received a 9-1-1 call reporting that an SUV with open doors and its engine running was parked atop the double yellow lines in the middle of a street, blocking traffic. The caller said the driver (Crutcher), who had abandoned the vehicle, seemed to be impaired and was claiming that the car was going to blow up. Police came to the scene and observed Mr. Crutcher walking towards the vehicle with his hands up. One officer at the scene later reported that Crutcher was sweating heavily and smelled of PCP, a drug that is commonly called “Angel Dust” and is known for its mind-altering effects.
At a certain point, Crutcher moved to reach into the vehicle despite being told to stop by police. One officer tased him, and another – who was female — shot him. Crutcher died later that evening in a local hospital. No weapon was recovered from the scene of the shooting, either on Crutcher’s person or in his vehicle. Autopsy results released by the Oklahoma state medical examiner indicated that at the time of the shooting, Crutcher had “acute fencyclidine intoxication.” The report further indicated that Crutcher had tested positive for tenocyclidine, a psychostimulant and hallucinogen that is even more potent than PCP. The district attorney charged the female officer who had shot Crutcher with manslaughter, but a jury acquitted her because Crutcher, despite having been ordered to stop, had reached into his car, provoking the fatal shot.
Crump, for his part, said that reports linking Crutcher to drugs were an attempt to “intellectually justify” the man’s death. “If we started to condemn everybody to death who had drugs in their system, all of our neighborhoods would be affected,” he asserted.
During a January 2017 speech commemorating Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, Crump depicted the the fight against systemic injustices committed by police at the expense of African Americans, as the latest chapter in the U.S. civil-rights movement:
“We must all face the uncomfortable truth that it is dangerous to be black in America. Shockingly, our courts have accepted that race is relevant evidence in determining the reasonableness of using deadly force — by police and regular citizens standing their ground and defending their property against a vague threat….We are at a crossroads in America’s civil rights movement….This systematic belief that black people are inherently dangerous has created an ‘open season’ on people of color in America….This is not a moment for silence. It’s not a moment to go about our ordinary business and look the other way. This is a moment for all Americans of good intent — black and white — to raise our voices and claim our God-given brotherhood.”
In July 2019, Crump endorsed then-Senator Kamala Harris for president, saying: “When you look up some of the stuff that she’s tried to do working from the inside, you know that she understands the challenges of trying to get progress when there are a lot of powers-that-be [sic] that are pushing against the cause for equal justice.”
In October 2019, Crump released a book entitled Open Season: Legalized Genocide of Colored People. Discussing the work during an interview with St. Louis Public Radio, Crump stated the following:
During the tumultuous year of 2020, which featured the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and widespread social unrest, Crump represented the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Jacob Blake – blacks who had been either wounded or killed in highly publicized incidents.
On February 23, 2020, a 25-year-old black man named Ahmaud Arbery was killed in Satilla Shores, a neighborhood near the city of Brunswick Georgia. Just prior to his death, Arbery was pursued by three white residents who were armed and suspected him of being a burglar running from the scene of a crime. Most news reports stated that Arbury was merely out for an afternoon jog when he was accosted by the white men. One of those men, Travis McMichael, attempted to perform a “citizen’s arrest” of Arbery, who resisted and was fatally shot in the scuffle.
This was a case of unauthorized vigilantes taking the law — or what they thought was the law –into their own hands. And they were criminally charged by the authorities. Each of the three was indicted on 9 counts: malice murder, 4 counts of felony murder, 2 counts of aggravated assault, false imprisonment, and criminal attempt to commit false imprisonment.
But there was no evidence to suggest that the three white men were motivated by racial animus. The case was far more complex than most news reports and the charge of “malice murder” indicated. In April 2021 — more than a year after Arbery’s death — newly released court documents based on police reports, videos, and eyewitness accounts, indicated that he had a history of running away from various locations after committing criminal trespass, or theft, or both. “In 2019 and 2020,” said one such document, “local convenience-store witness interviews reveal [that] Mr. Arbery became known as ‘The Jogger’ for his repeated conduct and behavior of running up, stretching in front, and then entering several convenience stores where he would grab items and run out before he got caught.” Another court document stated, “In 2020, witness cell phone video reveals Mr. Arbery was confronted at a convenience store by employees about his theft conduct and behavior. Mr. Arbery … chose to fight a man who worked on location at the adjacent truck stop who tried to confront him about it.”
Notwithstanding these multiple highly significant facts which cast Arbery in a very negative light, Benjamin Crump lamented in 2023: “Ahmaud Arbery was lynched for jogging while black.”
In 2020, Crump was hired to legally represent the family and “estate” of Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency-room medical technician in Kentucky who was killed shortly after midnight on March 13, 2020 by police gunfire during a raid on her apartment, which was a suspected distribution center for a crack cocaine and fentanyl dealer named Jamarcus Glover, Taylor’s former boyfriend. Local police were well aware that Taylor had not only kept in touch with Glover since their breakup, but that she also had been involved in Glover’s criminal activities – much as she had been involved when she and Glover were a couple. As former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy wrote: “In the years that followed [the dating relationship between Taylor and Glover], Glover was repeatedly arrested on drug charges, and Taylor arranged bail for him and one of his confederates on at least two occasions. Weeks before the fateful March 2020 raid, when Glover was in custody after yet another arrest, they [Taylor and Glover] were recorded exchanging intimacies on the phone. After that, police surveillance established that Glover continued to make regular trips to Taylor’s apartment, and Taylor herself was seen outside a house that investigators say was part of the drug trafficking operations.”
Moreover, Glover had called Taylor from jail dozens of times since their breakup. Taylor’s car was seen several times in the vicinity of a “trap house” – i.e., a drug storage facility — associated with Glover, and she was photographed in front of that location in mid-February 2020. Police also had evidence that Glover used Taylor’s address to receive parcels sent by mail. And he was seen leaving her apartment carrying a package directly to a trap house in mid-January. All these facts led police investigators to suspect that Taylor’s apartment might have been part of Glover’s drug network. As it turned out, there were no drugs in Taylor’s home at the time of her death. But this knowledge came tragically too late.
In the hours after he was arrested in a separate raid on March 13, Jamarcus Glover made repeated phone calls from the jail in which he was being held. In those calls, which were recorded by police, he informed a man that he (Glover) had exchanged texts with the now-deceased Breonna Taylor the day before, about items that he had arranged to have shipped to her apartment. Glover also told the man that Taylor had been “hanging onto my money” while he tried to come up with enough cash to post bond. And when he spoke to the mother of his child in a police-recorded phone call that same day, Glover said: “This is what you got to understand, don’t take it wrong, but Bre [Breonna] been handling all my money, she been handling my money…. She been handling shit for me and Cuz, it ain’t just me.”
Taylor’s life ended in violence and blood. At 12:30 on the morning of March 13, three white officers appeared with a no-knock warrant at the door of Taylor’s apartment. Their supervisors had instructed them to knock anyway and announce that they were police. They later claimed to have done exactly that, although Taylor’s new boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, who was also in the apartment with her, claims not to have heard them. Whatever the case, the officers, having elicited no response to their verbal announcements, used a battering ram to break down the door. Roused either by the officers’ voices or by the sound of the breaking door, Taylor and Walker got out of bed and went to the entrance hall of the apartment. Walker, who was carrying a gun, fired at the intruders in the darkness, hitting Sergeant Jonathan Mattingly in the leg. This triggered a hail of bullets from the officers, six of which hit Taylor and killed her.
In March 2022, Crump met with Kristen Clarke, Assistant U.S. Attorney General for Civil Rights, to demand an investigation into all three officers. “They said, ‘Be not dismayed,'” Crump stated, recounting the meeting. “They’re turning over every stone, looking at any civil rights charges on behalf of Breonna Taylor, because they would do the same for any citizen. Because Breonna Taylor deserves it.”
In an August 2024 interview with Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, Crump, lamenting that the officers who had fatally shot Breonna Taylor were never criminally charged for her death, said: “[I]t continues the systematic pattern of disrespect to black women and the fact that there is little to no justice when black women are unjustly killed by those who are supposed to protect and serve them.”
In the late afternoon of August 23, 2020, police officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin responded to a 9-1-1 call from a woman claiming that her ex-boyfriend, Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old father of six, had violated a restraining order by coming to her home and stealing her car keys. The restraining order was related to a previous incident in which Blake was alleged to have committed felony sexual assault against her, and for which an arrest warrant had been issued on Blake. In fact, the woman claimed that Blake sexually assaulted her approximately twice per year, usually after drinking heavily. Blake also had a noteworthy criminal record beyond his past encounters with the ex-girlfriend. In September 2015, for instance, he had been charged with multiple gun-related offenses and resisting arrest.
When the Kenosha police responded to the aforementioned 9-1-1 call on August 23, they were aware of the sexual assault charge and the outstanding warrant for Blake’s arrest. Upon arriving at the scene, they found Blake in his car with three of his young sons in the back seat. Instead of submitting to the arrest, Blake engaged in a violent fight with the officers, two of whom tased him unsuccessfully. Unable to restrain Blake, the officers then drew their firearms and ordered him to stop. Disregarding their commands, Blake walked purposefully around the vehicle, opened the driver’s-side door, and lunged downward. Fearing that Blake might be reaching for a weapon — a knife was later found on the floor of the car — one officer, Rusten Sheskey, shouted, “Drop the knife! Drop the knife!” When Blake failed to comply, the officer fired seven shots at him, hitting him four times in the back. Blake was rushed to a Milwaukee hospital, but his wounds left him paralyzed from the waist down. From his hospital bed, Blake pleaded not guilty to the sexual assault charges against him. He was represented by Benjamin Crump, who called for the arrest of the officer who had shot Blake, and for the firing of the others who were involved.
In a January 6, 2021 interview with WGN News, Crump said that the police officer’s claim that he had shot Blake in self-defense “reeks of racism and discrimination.” “They should not shoot first and ask questions later, as they often do with African Americans,” Crump declared. “But yet we see our white brothers and sisters who are threatening with guns, and they [the police] always figure how to de-escalate the situation. But it seems to be a double standard when it comes to minorities…. [T]there seem to be two justice systems in America.”
Also in January 2021, Crump, in response to the news that Kenosha District Attorney Michael Gravely had decided not to pursue any criminal charges against Officer Rusten Sheskey, issued the following statement in conjunction with co-counsels Patrick A. Salvi II and B’Ivory LaMarr:
“We are immensely disappointed in Kenosha District Attorney Michael Gravely’s decision not to charge the officers involved in this horrific shooting. We feel this decision failed not only Jacob and his family, but the community that protested and demanded justice.
“Officer Sheskey’s actions sparked outrage and advocacy throughout the country, but the District Attorney’s decision not to charge the officer who shot Jacob in the back multiple times, leaving him paralyzed, further destroys trust in our justice system. This sends the wrong message to police officers throughout the country. It says it is OK for police to abuse their power and recklessly shoot their weapon, destroying the life of someone who was trying to protect his children.
“… It is now our duty to broaden the fight for justice on behalf of Jacob and the countless other Black men and women who are victims of racial injustice and police brutality in this country. We will continue to press forward with a civil lawsuit and fight for systemic change in policing and transparency at all levels.”
An American Spectator piece authored by former federal prosecutor George Parry provides crucial details pertaining to the infamous case of George Floyd, whose police-involved death on May 25, 2020 sparked thousands of protests and hundreds of violent riots across the United States during the weeks that followed. Writes Parry:
“[T]he physical, scientific, and electronically recorded evidence in the case overwhelmingly and conclusively proves that these defendants [the police officers who encountered George Floyd on May 25] are not guilty of the charges and, in fact, played no material role in bringing about Floyd’s death.
“Instead, the evidence proves that, when he first encountered the police, George Floyd was well on his way to dying from a self-administered drug overdose. Moreover, far from publicly, brazenly, and against their own self-interest slowly and sadistically killing Floyd in broad daylight before civilian witnesses with video cameras, the evidence proves that the defendants exhibited concern for Floyd’s condition and twice called for emergency medical services to render aid to him. Strange behavior, indeed, for supposedly brutal law officers allegedly intent on causing him harm.
“Similarly, the evidence recorded by the body cameras worn by the police conclusively establishes that Floyd repeatedly complained that he couldn’t breathe before the police restrained him on the ground. As documented by Floyd’s autopsy and toxicology reports, his breathing difficulty was caused not by a knee on his neck or pressure on his back, but by the fact that he had in his bloodstream over three times the potentially lethal limit of fentanyl, a powerful and dangerous pain medication known to shut down the respiratory system and cause coma and death. He also had in his system a lesser dose of methamphetamine, which can cause paranoia, respiratory distress, coma, and death.
“Beyond those findings, his autopsy disclosed no physical injuries that could in any way account for his demise.”
But Crump, choosing to ignore the foregoing facts, was determined to cast the Floyd case as a manifestation of white police racism against a black man. During a May 2021 interview with NPR, Crump said:
In a virtual lecture hosted by the Brown Lecture Board on October 27, 2020, Crump told the 120 online attendees:
At the NAACP Image Awards ceremony on February 25, 2023, Crump received the organization’s Social Justice Impact Award. In his acceptance speech, he said: “I accept this award as greater motivation to continue to be an unapologetic defender of Black life, Black liberty and Black humanity.”
Crump further stated that he was prepared to “fight for Black history in and outside of the courtrooms” – a reference to: (a) the Florida Department of Education’s assertion that the Advanced-Placement African American Studies course “lacks educational value”; and (b) other Florida regulations prohibiting schools from teaching the tenets of critical race theory. “We will not let elected officials exterminate our history, our literature, or our culture – not in Florida or any of the other 50 states,” Crump said. “Because it is so important that both black children and white children and all children know that black history matters because black history is American history.”
In May 2023, a video went viral on social media showing Sarah Comrie — a white, visibly pregnant physician’s assistant employed by New York City’s Bellevue Hospital — struggling to grab a rental Citi Bike from a black teenager who had taken it away from her and told her: “This is my bike, it’s on my account.” When Comrie began crying during the dispute, other black youths at the scene laughed at her, heckled her, and told her that her baby was going to be born “retarded.” After news of the video spread, Crump reflexively concluded that Comrie had tried to cheat the black youth out of a bike that was rightfully his to use. “This is unacceptable!” Crump wrote in a May 15 post on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter). “A white woman was caught on camera attempting to STEAL a Citi Bike from a young Black man in NYC. She grossly tried to weaponize her tears to paint this man as a threat. This is EXACTLY the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past!”
Because of Crump’s accusations of racism, Comrie’s employer put her on a leave of absence and posted a pair of social media messages that said:
Comrie subsequently presented receipts proving that she, and not the black teens who tormented her, had in fact rented the bike in question.
But Crump, for his part, never apologized for all the needless hardship that his reckless allegations had caused Ms. Comrie. Instead, just hours after a Fox News segment wherein Comrie’s attorney, Justin Marino, announced that his client would be filing defamation lawsuits regarding the matter, Crump quietly deleted his post from X.
In September 2023, Crump and fellow lawyer Bradley Gage filed a $500 million class-action lawsuit against Beverly Hills, California, accusing the city’s police of engaging in racial profiling against African Americans. Specifically, the attorneys: (a) decried the fact that between August 30, 2019 and August 30, 2021, blacks accounted for 34% of all arrestees within Beverly Hills, while constituting fewer than 2% of the city’s residents; and (b) claimed that 1,086 of the 1,088 blacks arrested by the Beverly Hills Police Department during that same time period had been arrested unjustly. While some local authorities suggested that many of those arrested had been caught up in the city’s Rodeo Drive Task Force targeting the perpetrators of fraudulent purchases in the renowned shopping district, Crump had an alternate explanation: “It wasn’t to deter crime. It was to send a message to black people that we don’t want your kind around here. That is racial profiling 101!” In a similar spirit, Gage told reporters: “In two years, 1,088 black people arrested, only two convictions. There’s only one explanation for that. They want to drive black people out of the city.”
In a 2024 NBC documentary titled Black Men in America: Road to 2024, Crump said: “They come up with things [crimes] to profile us for. And so whatever laws were made — I believe this … We can get rid of all the crime in America overnight, just like that, and people ask ‘How, Attorney Crump?’ Change the definition of ‘crime.’ If you get to define what conduct is gonna be made criminal, you can predict who the criminals are gonna be … They made the laws to criminalize our culture, black culture.”
During a March 4, 2024 appearance on the Armstrong Williams Show, Crump claimed that the American criminal-justice system is much likelier to impose a death sentence on criminals who kill white victims, than on those who kill black victims. “If you kill a black person,” he said, “you’re not likely to make it to death row. But, if you kill a white person and you happen to be a black person, there’s a much greater chance you’re going to get on death row.”
During that same March 4, 2024 appearance on the Armstrong Williams Show, Crump, citing the case of Payton Gendron — a white gunman who in May 2022 had killed 10 people in a racially motivated attack in Buffalo, New York — articulated his desire to hold gun dealers accountable for crimes committed with the weapons they sell. “In Buffalo, New York, we got to hold that young white supremacist accountable,” said Crump, “and we got to hold everybody who helped him load that gun, whether it’s the gun manufacturers, gun distributors – everybody in that chain.”