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In the line of fire, cops are on their own
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 | 'A split second decision' Web-exclusive:Two men -- one a cop and one an ex-cop -- provide their expertise on officer-involved shootings, based, in part, on their own experiences. Dateline NBC |
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POLICE SHOOTINGS |
It is impossible to say whether fatal shootings involving police officers are more or less common today. Federal statistics indicate that police officers used justified deadly force about 370 times a year from 1976 through 2004, the last year for which complete numbers are available. That number doesn’t break down how many of them were shootings — it includes incidents in which civilians were beaten up or died some other way. Nor does it include any deaths that were ruled unjustified. Those become part of the general criminal docket. Under the 1994 Crime Control Act, the Justice Department is supposed to compile such data, but its annual reports are nearly useless, thanks to incomplete reporting by local authorities, who use different definitions of “deadly force” from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. — Alex Johnson/MSNBC.com |
Many officers involved in fatal shootings react the same way. But not all of them. After interviewing scores of officers involved in shootings for his book, Klinger said there was one consistent thread in all the stories.
“For all the officers, it was a life-changing experience,” Klinger said. “Not always a negative — for some officers, it was quite positive, in the sense that they wondered, ‘Will I be able to do my job if I need to?’ I.e., ‘Will I be able to pull the trigger if I need to?’ ”
Klinger was not in that camp.
“For other officers ... it’s life-changing in the sense that it’s something we didn’t want to do,” he said. “We tried our best to avoid it. And living with the notion of taking another human life is simply tough for many officers.”
For cops, lives are altered
Worst of all, said Fuhr, the Missouri cop, is that the public doesn’t get it.
“I don’t even like watching police shows, because I see things that anger me,” he said. “Because we don’t do them that way. They’re either stupid, they’re wrong, they’re illegal or they’re just not factual.”
And yet, Klinger said, the public pigeonholes cops as swaggering macho guys — even the women — with itchy trigger fingers thanks to those shows and movies like the “Lethal Weapon” series.
“Mel Gibson and Danny Glover running and gunning through the streets of Los Angeles and various environs around Southern California — that’s just not how it is. It simply isn’t,” he said. “The other thing is, it doesn’t show what happens afterwards. ...
“Dirty Harry or whoever shoots them up, and then he goes home and he’s happy. He drinks a Scotch, goes out on a date, whatever the case might be. The impact that it has on the officers is simply something that doesn’t show up at all.”
Klinger said a good officer was always cognizant that he or she was “an agent of the state exercising the ultimate power of the state to take a life.”
“It should come easy in the sense of solid, sound decision-making, when a practiced, experienced officer says: ‘Hey, look, my life and the life of an innocent party besides myself is in imminent jeopardy. I need to shoot.’ That part should be simple,” he said.
“But the morality of it should never be forgotten.”
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