Training Day

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

Things come in threes.

Three stories this month about cops killing or gravely wounding suspects who were no threat to the officers or anyone else, and in one case in my own neck of the woods may have saved the life of the cop who killed him.

Many will assume evil officer intent. Sometimes that’s true. Most cases, I think it’s something else.

Yesterday two Chicago policemen who shot an unarmed man, and some poor innocent who just happened to be walking by, were acquitted by a judge of various misconduct charges. The judge found it “within reason” that the man armed with a wine bottle and cell phone was shot three times (twice in the back), and a strolling bystander shot once, “under these particular circumstances.”

“These particular circumstances” included that the policemen worked in an accident investigation unit (not a crime unit), stopped to investigate a few folks loitering in front of a closed store (not an accident) — one of whom, a teen who did have a gun but turned away from the officers to flee — and the officers opened fire not just at the teen, but everyone. The teen did turn and return fire, but hit no one, probably because he had no firearms training, which may have been only slightly less than what the policemen had.

The officers were on their way to the police academy, for training, when they stopped at the scene of the non-accident. Pity they never got there.

Three days before that decision, a Philadelphia judge dismissed all charges, including murder, against a policeman there who shot through a fully closed car window during a traffic stop and killed a man on the other side holding a knife. Shot him six times. The officer testified he thought his partner warned him about a gun, though the partner testified he warned about a knife, and the initial police version was that the driver had lunged with the knife at the cop, whose own body camera footage showed that wasn’t true.

The judge said the shooting was justified because the officer was reacting out of fear for his safety. It probably is true that an undertrained officer is more afraid in almost any situation than a well-trained one.

The man who died a couple of years ago in my state was almost certainly better trained than the officer who killed him, the officer whose life it was possible he had just saved. The dead man had trained for nearly a year with the handgun he had bought with the intention that someday he might stop a mass shooter. The day he died he did that. He stopped a man who had just killed a police officer and had the intention to kill as many more as he could. He stood in front of a man armed with an AR-15, steadied his handgun, and stopped him.

As he was disarming, on his knees, the would-be mass murderer’s weapon, he didn’t know that another police officer stood seventy-five feet behind him, deciding whether to warn him first or just shoot him. Didn’t know the officer feared he could be a second shooter. Didn’t know the officer also feared his training wasn’t enough to assure him he could hit a man turning on him with an AR-15 from less than the distance between home plate and first base.

So the last thing the man heard was the three bullets the officer fired at him, the last thing he felt the one that hit him in the back.

I write about it today because the man’s still grieving mother won a lawsuit yesterday against the police department. The $2.8 million settlement probably won’t settle her grief anytime soon.

You don’t spray a group of people with gunfire because one of them is running away.

You don’t shoot a man holding a knife on the other side of a closed car window.

You don’t shoot a man in the back without warning, who you don’t know whether he just shot your friend or just saved your life.

I don’t know that these cops needed to be sent to jail. They sure as hell needed to be sent back to school.