Staight shooting: Tactics to reduce police shootings

Josey1

Staight shooting: Tactics to reduce police shootingsTHE ISSUE: How to reduce police shootings OUR VIEW: Keys are less-lethal weapons, early warning system There are those who say the Denver Police Department doesn't give a fig about trigger-happy officers, since only five have been disciplined for civilian shootings during the past decade -- out of 126 involved in shooting incidents. And even at that, the worst punishment was a mere three-day suspension and a one-day fine. We're not happy with those statistics, either. Yet clearly the department does care enough to take one of the most significant steps it could to reduce the number of civilian deaths at the hands of cops. It is training and equipping every neighborhood patrol officer and supervisor with "less-lethal weapons" for confrontations with people who do not qualify as hardened criminals. It isn't pleasant being incapacitated by an M26 Taser, a shotgun firing beanbags or a rifle ejecting PepperBall projectiles. But at least the suspect will live to see a trial or a mental ward. The alternative, in many cases, is to send him to a morgue. We consider the department's adoption of these less-lethal weapons -- far ahead of most comparable departments, by the way -- to be one of its most laudable decisions in many years. Few spectacles are more pathetic than police shooting an addle-brained drunk brandishing a butcher knife who staggers toward them on his front porch, or a fellow so distraught by personal crisis that he seems determined to make officers end his life. An analysis by Rocky Mountain News reporters Sarah Huntley and Brian D. Crecente suggests police could have used less-lethal weapons in one-fourth of police shootings between 1990 and 2000. And the other shootings? Well, most of them were justified, given the need for police to defend themselves and to stop hardened criminals from flight. But a few have provoked legitimate questions about police behavior and the investigations that followed. And juries in a small number of civil cases have agreed. We say civil cases, because only two officers since 1990 have faced charges as a result of shootings, and both were acquitted in jury trials. That's one reason we agree with Samual Walker, a University of Nebraska-Omaha expert in police accountability, who says it does no good to rail at prosecutors for failing to take more cases to trial. "That is just the wrong focus," he told the News. "The standard of proof is so high you aren't going to convict . . . but it is reasonable to expect officers to be disciplined internally." Indeed it is. And we think it's also high time that the department implemented an early-warning system regarding police conduct that triggered possible retraining when an officer's pattern of behavior became cause for concern. Fortunately, Safety Manager Ari Zavaras and Chief Gerry Whitman tell us they actually began developing such a warning system more than a year ago, although it is not yet in place. Finally, something needs to be done about Denver's Public Safety Review Commission. It's not just a toothless watchdog agency -- which everyone realized it would be when it was created -- it's also become all but irrelevant because of the lengthy delays before it processes cases. By the time it gets around to criticizing the handling of a police shooting, literally years are likely to have passed. City officials need either to give the review commission the resources to do the job quickly, or they need to find another way of ensuring civilian oversight. Because meaningful civilian oversight remains a precondition for full public confidence in the police. http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/opinion/article/0,1299,DRMN_38_893415,00.html