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NEWS > 26 March 2007

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Pattern of misconduct by New Orleans police
New Orleans police officers have often used deadly force without justification, repeatedly made unconstitutional arrests and engaged in racial profiling, the Justice Department said Thursday in a scathing report.

Mayor Mitch Landrieu called the report sobering but not surprising, given the highly publicized problems laid bare after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The mayor had requested the review shortly after taking office in May 2010 and said many of the problems outlined in the report were exposed after Katrina but existed long before the storm devastated the low-lying city on the Miss... Read more

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26 March 2007
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In the line of fire, cops are

Police say they are trained to shoot to kill, but not to handle the fallout

As details emerged about the fatal shooting by New York police late last year of Sean Bell, a 23-year-old unarmed man, one number stood out:

50.

Five officers got off 50 shots. Thirty-one of them were fired by one officer, who emptied his gun, reloaded and continued firing.

“My first reaction was, uh-oh. Why? Why?”

David Klinger’s question has been asked many times since Bell was killed and two of his friends were wounded outside a Queens nightclub on Nov. 25, which was to have been Bell’s wedding day. The incident, in which two of the five officers have been indicted on manslaughter charges and a third faces lesser charges, sparked a series of protests by New Yorkers numbering in the thousands.

David Klinger, however, is not a protester or a victim’s rights advocate. He is an ex-cop, a street veteran of the gang wars in South Central Los Angeles. Today, he is a professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St. Louis.

“The first thing that I thought about is, what sort of training did they have?” said Klinger, who interviewed 80 police officers involved in fatal shootings for his book “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force.”

‘Maybe we need to shoot the driver’
The Justice Department’s “Principles for Promoting Police Integrity” declare that officers are authorized to use deadly force “only when it is reasonable and necessary to protect the officer or others from imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.”

The Rev. Al Sharpton and other activists point out that Bell and his friends were unarmed. How could they have posed an “imminent danger”?

Klinger stressed that it was important to let the investigation play out before drawing any conclusions. But he noted that Bell and his friends were in a moving car.

“It is possible that 50 rounds needed to be fired in order to stop a threat, because, remember, a motor vehicle traveling at anything over a few miles an hour can be a deadly instrument,” Klinger said.

“It makes sense that maybe we need to shoot the driver who’s trying to run us down. But then why were two other people struck with bullets?” he asked. “Could it because one of them acted as if he had a gun? Even though no gun was found?”

Klinger said he just couldn’t know, and neither could anyone other than the five officers themselves.

 

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