Tupac trial spotlights decades of US police failures in solving the case

Tupac Shakur poses for a portrait on in Oakland, California. Photograph: Gary Reyes /Oakland Tribune Staff Archives via Getty View image in fullscreen Tupac Shakur poses for a portrait on in Oakland, California. Photograph: Gary Reyes /Oakland Tribune Staff Archives via Getty Tupac trial spotlights decades of US police failures in solving the case Police received information nearly immediately after the killing. It took Las Vegas police 27 years to make an arrest For years, US law enforcement officials blamed their failure to solve hip-hop star Tupac Shakur’s murder on the lack of cooperation from key witnesses, and on gang members’ “snitches get stitches” culture. But testimony in a much-delayed murder trial, which concluded this week, almost 30 years after Shakur’s death, highlighted just how much law enforcement officials knew about the shooting, and how early. On Monday, a Southside Compton Crips gang leader and drug dealer, Duane “Keffe D” Davis, was convicted for orchestrating Shakur’s killing. Davis told investigators in 2008 that it was his nephew, Orlando “Baby Lane” Anderson, who pulled the trigger. Anderson died in an unrelated shooting in 1998. The lack of resolution in Shakur’s murder had resonated painfully not just with the artist’s own family and friends, but with many Black Americans. View image in fullscreen Fans, friends and family attend the posthumous unveiling ceremony of hip-hop legend Tupac Shakur’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in Los Angeles in 2023. And indeed, witnesses in the trial put a new spotlight on allegations of police corruption and incompetence, the mixed motivations of investigators, and law enforcement turf wars that went on for years behind the scenes of the homicide investigation. What the police knew, and when Though it would take Las Vegas police 27 years before they made their first arrest in Shakur’s murder, testimony at Davis’s trial revealed that police received information almost immediately about what prompted the killing, and who might be behind it. View image in fullscreen Chief deputy district attorney Marc DiGiacomo questions Jeffrey Scott, a senior crime scene analyst for the Las Vegas Metropolitan police department, during the trial for Duane Davis in Las Vegas on 25 August. Photograph: John Locher/Pool via ReutersSurveillance footage played at the trial showed Shakur, the Death Row Records founder, Marion “Suge” Knight, and their associates, some affiliated with the Mob Piru Bloods, assaulting Anderson at the MGM hotel in Las Vegas, an attack that Davis would later say prompted him and his nephew to seek revenge on Shakur.