Police Shoot Man In Hollywood

Since the decision not to indict in Ferguson was released it seems like hardly a day goes by in which police shootings are not in the news. I noted this trend yesterday, and today there is a new story–a shooting of a man by police in Hollywood who had a knife in his pocket.

As Think Progress notes, we do not yet know the full details of this situation, but it does appear to be part of a disturbing trend of police escalation of incidents both in Los Angeles and in other cities around the country.

While details of Friday’s shooting are still emerging, officers seemed to have engaged in the same rapid escalation that has been criticized in other recent shootings. In St. Louis this past August, officers shot a man holding a knife less than 20 seconds after arriving at the convenience store where he had allegedly stolen two cans of soda. While police in Los Angeles, St. Louis, and New York City have long been criticized over their deployment of lethal force, Burlington, VT officers had not fired their guns on duty in 16 years when they killed a mentally ill man last November because he was brandishing a shovel.

These clashes occupy a different category of police violence from the killings of unarmed black men that have sparked mass street protest around the country in recent months, such as the barehanded killing of Eric Garner by New York police who applied a prohibited chokehold while the 43-year-old said “I can’t breathe” repeatedly. Protests have also been inflamed by twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who Cleveland police shot and killed for playing with a toy gun. The officers killed Rice so soon after getting to the scene that the driver of the car wasn’t even out of his cruiser yet. Officer Timothy Loehmann’s record of handling his weapon was so poor that a previous department had forced him to step down.

Los Angeles police are also under scrutiny as the public awaits the release of autopsy results in the LAPD killing of Ezell Ford, an unarmed man who eyewitnesses say was laying on the ground when officers shot him this past summer. Ford was killed two days after officers in Ferguson, MO shot unarmed teenager Michael Brown.

In each case, trained officers escalated the situation, and killed someone who might have been subdued another way. Police killings are notoriously difficult to track and analyze systematically because hundreds of them never get reported to official crime and violence databases maintained by the federal government.

After all the attention paid to such incidents recently, one might think that the police would be trying to avoid the use of lethal force whenever possible. Instead it looks like the police might have picked up upon another lesson we have learned–it is very unlikely for police involved in shootings to be indicted or otherwise disciplined.