For those interested in an honest police perspective on shooting (and not shooting) people, I recommend Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force by professor and former police officer David Klinger. It’s a lot of 1st-hand accounts of deadly force incidents. And it’s good stuff. You can read an excerpt here.
Tag: police-involved shooting
Regarding Sean Bell
Clearly something wrong happened because an innocent man was killed,” Peter Moskos, author of Cop in the Hood, and a professor at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told TIME. “But that’s not what the system was testing. They were testing if there was reasonable doubt. I think the verdict is fair, but it doesn’t address that this…
3 Detectives in Bell Shooting Acquitted
You heard it here first in my March 6 post. My gut knows the police did something wrong because Sean Bell is dead. But what should a reasonable police officer have done? I don’t know. I never had to shoot my gun on duty. My gun was never the only thing between me and an SUV trying to kill me.…
Wild gun fight. Police shoot bad guy. Officers shot.
This one, if the Sunis to be believed, sounds wild. Though if the Sunis to be believed, this happened in East Baltimore (you know, where bad things happen). Best I can tell it started in the Central and ended in the Northern. Officer Anthony Jobst, 47, was in his patrol car in the first block of E. Lafayette Ave. about…
The Trial in the Killing of Sean Bell
Sean Bell, an unarmed black man, should not have died. But the officers on trial won’t be convicted of anything major. The police certainly make mistakes. We all do. Like it or not, mistakes aren’t usually crimes, especially for police. After any high-profile police shooting, there is the hope that time will reveal the truth and truth will lead to…
Police kill white people, too
But you usually don’t hear about it. I call this the Al Sharpton effect. There is no white version of Al Sharpton. As the trial of the officers involved in the Sean Bell killing begins, I’ve been thinking more about police-involved shootings and race. Given media reports, it certainly seems like police only kill black people. But I know this…
The untimely death of Khiel Coppin
An unarmed man was killed by police Monday in Brooklyn. Here’s the New York Times account. This isn’t going to start any riots. Trust me. By all reasonable accounts, this was a “good” shooting. It always sounds bad to describe the shooting of an unarmed man as “good,” but in police parlance, “good” and “bad” shootings aren’t a moral judgment…