In the line of fire, cops are on their own

MAHWAH, N.J. - 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.

A cop does what he has to do
“That’s what we pay police officers for, is to go out and put themselves in those situations and stop people from carrying out violent acts in our society.”

To Maj. Don Fuhr, an administrative division commander with the Springfield, Mo., police, “the car is a weapon.”

Most police regulations, including those of the New York department, say “you do not fire on a vehicle or from a vehicle unless there has been a violent act by the person inside or your life is in danger,” said Fuhr, an instructor at the Springfield police academy. “And yet, there isn’t a cop I know where if he’s been rammed by a car wouldn’t take a shot, because his life is in danger.”

For Fuhr, the question of whether to shoot is personal.

In 1989, he was on foot, chasing a man suspected of threatening people in a laundry, when the suspect turned and pulled a knife. Fuhr fired four shots, three of which struck the man, who died at the scene.

It was ruled a clean shoot. It was what he had been trained to do. And he had been there before.

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