I have seen videos of two recent shootings of black men by cops, and of course, heard a great deal about Michael Brown’s shooting in Ferguson. A lot has been written about whether the cops were justified in shooting this at guy or that, but way too little, in my opinion, about how they shot.
Michael Brown was shot at least six times, while (some say) he had his hands up. Kajieme Powell was shot nine times by cops standing a few feet from him. Walter Scott was shot eight times in the back as he ran away from an officer.
What strikes me about these incidents is that in each case, as soon as the shooting started, it continued, with multiple shots fired at the bodies of the victims. Apparently there was never any thought given to shooting once and pausing to see what effect it had; likewise there was apparently no consideration given to shooting in a less lethal area such as an arm or a leg (in the two videos, the officers are close enough that a trained shooter should have been able to hit such an extremity). So the question I want to ask is not why the cops are shooting at these guys (OK, I do have that question, but it has been beaten to death), but, once they decide to shoot, why do they shoot to kill?
Now, I understand that in the real world, the good guys cannot shoot guns out of the hands of bad guys, like the Lone Ranger or Ephraim Zimbalist, Jr., on old TV shows. But come on: Kajieme Powell had a knife, and the other guys had no weapons at all. One shot to the leg should certainly get their attention and make them stop whatever behavior the officer objects to.
I have absolutely no evidence for this other than the videos I have seen, but they lead me inexorably to the conclusion that cops have been trained that once they start shooting, they should not stop until the victim is dead. And why would this be? I imagine that cops would say that they do not draw their weapons in the first place unless there is a threat, and if there is a threat they want to make damn sure that it is no longer a threat before they stop. And I sympathize with that sentiment. But I see another reason, one perhaps not spoken out loud even at the police academy.
Until Walter Scott’s shooting was captured on video, virtually every shooting has been justified by the cops saying that they felt threatened. As we saw with George Zimmerman, this is an invincible defense: in the absence of video evidence, no one can prove that a person did not feel threatened. And in virtually all cases, the cops closed ranks and defended each other. Most cops are brave men and women who put themselves in harm’s way every day to defend us from crime and violence; it is hard to tell them that no, they did not feel threatened, if they say they did. And dead victims cannot speak for themselves. So a secondary reason to keep shooting is to make sure that there is no testimony that would question the level of threat felt by the shooters.
To be clear, I am not saying that cops kill their victims to shut them up. In almost all cases, I imagine this thought does not cross their minds. But I do believe that cops are trained to shoot, shoot, shoot when they feel threatened. They are not taught to shoot once and pause; they are not taught to shoot at the leg until the situation escalates and body shots are necessary; and somewhere up the chain of command, someone was thinking about how complicated their lives would be if there were more survivors of police shootings.