[Editor’s note: Memory is often a wild card in officer-involved shooting investigations. Involved officers typically don’t remember certain things that happened or they remember them incorrectly or their recollections conflict with accounts of other witnesses. This is frustrating and often suspicious to investigators. [Just how memory works is still the subject of intense exploration by...Read More
The first time Robert Murtha fired his gun on duty was to kill a rabid skunk. The next time, he was shooting to stop another kind of skunk, some would say, a criminal fugitive and career drug dealer who Murtha claimed was trying to run him down with a car. But that time it was...Read More
When a 52-year-old man-shirtless, coked up and bleeding from self-inflicted wounds-lunged at Shannon Brady and her partner with a “serious” folding knife in the cramped kitchen of a small adobe house in Santa Fe, she was prepared to react. She shot him dead. What she hadn’t anticipated or trained for was what happened after the...Read More
The rumor bouncing around various law enforcement listservs piqued Cmdr. Michael Richards’ curiosity. Street gangs in California, the story went, were training members to shoot cops at night by aiming for the highly visible patch of white T-shirt exposed above the top of many officers’ vests. “The Triangle of Death,” posters to the listservs called...Read More
2 of a 2-Part series Editor’s Note In Part 1 we reported on a ground-breaking new study by researcher Tom Aveni on why and under what circumstances officers shoot suspects who end up not to be armed. Here we offer some of the significant implications of Aveni’s findings. Aveni is founder of The Police Policy...Read More
1 of a 2-Part Series The story is a frequent staple of the evening news. An officer shoots and kills a minority subject who turns out to be…unarmed. Protests explode, and the familiar litany is again asserted: racial bias by the cops underlies many of these inflammatory events. Now a new study by a member...Read More
Brief, dark, and grainy, the video image is a punch to the gut. A California sheriff’s deputy trying to detain a subject who’s on the ground after a high-speed chase says to him, “Get up! Get up!” The man says, “Ok, I’m gonna get up,” and starts to rise. Without another word, the deputy shoots...Read More
Part 2 of a 2-Part Series [Note: In Part 1 of this series, sent 6/18/07, we reported results of an important new study about LEOs and the use of deadly force, conducted by Dr. Darrell Ross, chairman of the Dept. of Law Enforcement and Justice Administration at Western Illinois University, who presented his findings at...Read More
Part 1 of a 2-part series A high percentage of officers leave law enforcement after they’re involved in a shooting. Suspects who try to kill officers are usually drunk, drugged, or deranged. When multiple cops are in an armed confrontation, they’ll likely experience “contagion fire” and blast off a wild fusillade of rounds. In matters...Read More
Part 1 of a 2-part series Civilians who judge the reasonableness of your use of force, whether they’re members of the media, of a review board, of a prosecutor’s staff, or of a jury, are likely to bring a welter of highly distorted beliefs to the process because they’ve undergone thousands of hours of “training”...Read More
