I'm usually NOT one to give cops the benefit of the doubt, but I suppose we should wait for more info to come out. The track record isn't good, though.

I can't think of anything else that might prevent this sort of thing.

I'm way past the point of ever giving cops the benefit of the doubt. Living nearby Prince George's country in Maryland will do that to you. The police there are thugs and are allowed to get away with murder.

If I'm not mistaken, I think TNC had a lengthy article about police conduct in Prince George county a few years ago. I could be mistaken.

It just sucks because this cop could be a good guy who made a terrible mistake. But unfortunately, its very difficult to give them the benefit of the doubt anymore.

Rob, I disagree: I think it's very unlikely that any "facts" will come to light in the ensuing investigation. If the Anaheim Chief of Police is already conceding that Alexander was innocent, what exactly still needs to be established?

Shit like this makes me so angry. I wasn't even expecting it either--usually it's Radley Balko's work that drives me insane on a bad day

F*ck that noise.

My guess is that he "fit the description", yet looked nothing like the suspect. Somehow he'll get away with it, because they always do.

Ice-T summed it up best

"Cops hate kids and kids hate cops
Cops kill kids with warning shots
What is crime and what is not?
What is justice? I think I forgot"

The officer may be a racist or may not, and possibly shooting Mr. Alexander, instead of one of the actual suspects, was an accident. The officer may be in total shock from grief and guilt at this moment - we don't know. Does that even matter? No. Perceptions that non-white people are more dangerous almost certainly were a primary cause in this shooting, whether the officer realizes it or not - he probably wouldn't have shot me standing on my porch with a broom or shower curtain rod.

Accident or intentional act, the young man is dead, and it is police brutality. There is no room for errors when guns are involved.

We're nowhere near the promised land.

Believe me, this is every cops worst nightmare.

Yeah, I remember reading that article. It was spot on. If this officer turns out to be a "nice guy" then the tragedy is double. That said, he should still be held accountable in the same way any other citizen under similar circumstances would be (read: charged with manslaughter). Actually, given that police are trained to handle these situations, it makes his negligence all the worse.

PS- Don't take this response as criticism of what you wrote. I understand what you're trying to convey, I just never trust the police to do the right thing when they've got their backs against the wall.

Police officers should be subject to the same expectations. Cops involved in accidental shootings like this one should never be allowed on the street with a firearm again.

Then you really misunderstand the union's purpose and mission. I wish I could say more. Maybe another union person on board can elaborate.

They have the "maximum force" mentality of the military without soldiers' usual accountability to the command structure, without the military's precision or training or discipline. And plenty of cops by the way, despite this, are extremely cautious and professional and err on the side of the public's safety in all cases - my point is not that the cops are evil, but that their whole training and the institutional mindset is all wrong. If you think you are at "War" out on the streets, "War On Crime" "War On Drugs", yet you are trained to shoot first ask questions second, of course you are going to be jittery with the gun! Again I don't suggest that we always second-guess cops who sometimes end up in very crazy complicated situations, but when they kill innocent civilians (by the way that "civilian-cop" distinction is another dismaying example of militarization in the police's attitude, regrettably it's probably here to stay after the super-high-crime 80's and was already natural to the insular cop world), you have to question them. Something is wrong here.

By the way, if people are interested in this issue, go over to Radley Balko, one of the best bloggers at Hit & Run - reason.com/blog - he follows this stuff very closely and never lets up. He is a great resource. I'd recommend that site in general, by the way, for a libertarian perspective on the many problems we face. They have some of the smartest commenters around.

-sv

"That's just shitbirds throwin' dirt at good police." -Stan Valchek

The Union is defending this officer because that is their job. The general feeling among his peers is that "there but for the grace of God go I".

We have over 400 murders a year here in Chicago. Generally the police kill fewer than 15 people a year. If we can find a way to reduce the first number the second number should go down. Even assuming every police shooting was unjustified and involved killing an innocent, which clearly AIN't true, what is the larger problem?

I don't claim to know what it's like to be a black guy constantly hassled by the police. I do know what it's like from my long ago military police experience to enter a room with my weapon at the ready and almost shoot someone.

I am of the firm belief that everything you need to know about urban America can be found by watching "The Wire". Przybo shot and killed an on duty out of uniform black officer. Did he make the wrong decision. Yep. Was he a bad cop or bad person? I don't think so.

We had a black cop killed here last month by a black suspect. Suspect was a bad guy with a long record. Many of the neighbors claimed that the police were at fault. Cop dead. Suspect alive, but injured.

Generally most of the murders here go relatively unnoticed. However, if a cop shoots someone I can almost guarantee the community reaction.

1. Neighbors say he was unarmed and a good person.

2. Reverends and local pols organize a march.

3. Attorney holds a press conference and files a lawsuit.

Relatively few police shootings involve innocents. Contrary to popular belief most cops, even in urban areas, never fire their weapons in the line of duty in 20 year plus careers. This isn't TV where police gunplay is a daily event on cop shows.

The victim here is an innocent black kid and his family. It also may be a good cop who made a bad decision that he will have to live with forever.

I'm not one to say that 99 percent of cops are good hard working folks. I think that about 20 percent of almost any police force should be forced out for laziness, brutality, corruption, physical unfitness or just stupidity. Of the rest I can say they do a difficult job that is generally unpopular.

I've seen some of the training material used to train the police in this sort of situation, and it's certainly not all aimed at "defend yourself first at any sign of possible danger". Some of the scenarios have suspicious-looking innocent people, and the correct response is not to shoot at all.

I've never seen a training session, so I don't know whether these scenerios are actually used in the training; but I'll bet they are, at least some places.

Except it's a bad decision he wouldn't have made if it had been my son coming out the door.

I have seen cops accused of racism for shooting at a black criminal (an actual criminal), and I've seen them accused of racism for "not doing enough" to get crime out of the inner city. Sometimes I wonder, What exactly are cops supposed to do?

Read this letter from a black cop, who tells a different side of the story:
http://www.fredoneverything.net/yyPGLetter.shtml

Disarm the police? You won't have any police then.

The reason cops are more wary of young black males is young black males are more likely to be armed and dangerous than a young white male. Look at who does the killing and who are the victims in a disproportionate amount of crime. Young black males.

You want to look at political crimes then look at middle aged or elderly white guys. Same with financial crime.

You can argue about the reasons behind those numbers, but denying the truth gets us nowhere.

As for another comment I happen to believe each cop in America should have headgear that records audio and visual. Placing it on a weapon makes little sense. Contrary to the movies firing a handgun accurately is a skill few people have. People see John Wayne riding as a one eyed fat man on a horse twirling his guns and shooting down half a dozen people and assume firing a handgun effectively is easy. It ain't.

The incidents of cops in this country shooting innocent people is likely well under 100 a year. It's difficult to know an exact number because of the way police shootings are generally investigated.

As I said earlier, and very eloquently, if we can figure out a way to reduce the overall violence rate "bad" police shootings will drop.

Better training for police will help. The larger issue is the overall violence rate in society.

You can focus on bad police shootings and save a relatively few lives a year. That is an honorable goal. You can focus on the overall picture and save thousands of lives a year. Better yet do both in tandem.

Remember the unintentionally wise words of Richard J Daley after the 1968 riots:

"The police are not here to create disorder, they're here to preserve disorder."

Come on man, be serious. Either\or is fucking weak--you can be outraged by the murder rate and by police shooting an innocent dude. Plus this isn't about Chicago, it's about Anaheim--where the murder rate is LOWER than the national average, not higher.

See here:
http://anaheim.areaconnect.com/crime1.htm

Moreover, there is no lynch mob here. I don't think dude should be charged. Just get him off the streets. There's no reason he should be on the street with a gun.

This situation is a nightmare for everyone involved.

Instead of killing that kid the situation could have been the cop shooting a burglar who pointed a weapon at him. At that moment that is likely what he thought.

I'm not hear trying to defend bad cops. As I stated earlier I think 20 percent of police have no business being cops.

We can agree that more needs to be done to reduce police involved shootings and just regular ole' thug involved shootings.

I always try to put myself in the other person's moccasins so to speak. At that moment what did the cop think?

It's a horrible situation for everyone involved.

I see you went back and changed your comment. I don't have that luxury. I also don't have the experience of losing a friend to a bad police shooting. I do have the experience of being threatened by an off duty cop. I stopped his thug son from beating the hell out of a black kid on a bike who had the audacity of crossing an invisible racial barrier back in the early 80's. Thug had a good memory for license plates and daddy showed up drunk at my family abode. Dad was the same ethnic background as me and later went to prison in a drug related police scandal. I kinda like that memory!

As for Anaheim or Chicago or Baltimore if a cop feels threatened they are likely going to fire their weapons.

I don't have a complete answer for this issue. Training, cameras, better screening of police applicants etc will reduce the number of shootings. It won't eliminate every innocent being killed.

One of the beauties of being raised Catholic is that you are taught to strive for perfection and also that perfection doesn't exist. At least in this life.

I'm sorry for the loss of your friend and I'm sorry for the loss of the young man in question.

I trust the police, across the country, to see my son as a different individual from other young men. I trust them to look once, twice, three times before deciding that he's aiming a gun. I trust them, even scanning a crime scene, even looking for an armed criminal, to be very, very careful about whether my son actually is a danger. I trust them to risk a full second before they shoot.

I trust them because my son is white.

I want to trust them, when they see a young black man, to be just as careful.

How do we get there? My basic prescription is that every police officer has to know ten young black men, not members of the force, whose deaths would grieve them personally and deeply. Even with guns out and the safety off, let them be able to imagine that the guy coming through the door could be Christopher, Peter, Carey, Mauricus, Nathan, Nicky, Tyrell, Justin, Harry, or JT.

When it's personal and individual, other mothers' sons will be as safe as mine is.

We can, in fact, have police who protect our children. All of them.

a second is a long time when you may have a gun being aimed at you.

That being said I understand your sentiment.

I hope we live in a world like that one day.

Right now we live in a world where a man I used to respect picks Caribou Barbie to be one elderly heartbeat away from the most important job in the world. We live in a world where a man kills his son, girlfriend and girlfriends mom because of some dispute and the only reason I know it is because the dead were related to a famous singer.

I wish we could solve the problems of the world by typing. If so I would have the Nobel Peace Prize and George W Bush would be a bartender in Dallas.

He probably made a bad decision in the heat of the chase. But that the cop wasn't a mustache-twirling bad guy doesn't mean that he personally should be back on duty with a gun. It doesn't really matter what he thought. He's shown that in the heat of the moment his judgment went the wrong way. When my grandmother ran a stop sign and slammed into another car, her true claims that she just didn't see the other car didn't mean she got to keep driving.

My suggestion is to pick up the new DVD of "The New Centurions" starring George C Scott as an LA cop in the early 70's.

Based on the work of Joseph Wambaugh. Who was to police novels in the 1970's what "The Wire" was to TV in this decade.

There is a scene in the movie where a cop shoots an innocent. It bares some similarity to this death.

I think I've said everything I can say. Unless I want to lower my IQ and start winking and saying "you betcha".

"No, I hear that. I'm not even sure the dude is a bad cop. What would I do in that situation? How can I know?"

This is dead on right - we do not know what kind of officer the shooter was, or even his race (at least I could not tell). Before one gets too fired up about charging police with crimes, I think they should be willing to take a job as an officer themselves. I mean, unless you are in that situation, with that stress actually on you, you do not know how you will react.

Based on what little we know from these stories, as a former attorney for a law enforcement organization, I agree with the idea that this cop should not be in law enforcement anymore - it is not fair to him, the organization, or the community to put him in this situation again. For his own good, and for the good of the organization he should change careers - if he wishes to remain in public service, perhaps as a firefighter.

Retraining for other puplic service duty -- EMT, firefighter, etc. -- is an excellent way to go. But cops who shoot the wrong people must never be allowed back into positions where they might be expected to deploy lethal force.