LOS ANGELES (AP) - The Los Angeles Police Commission voted Tuesday to change the policy for reviewing police shootings to specifically examine what an officer was doing before pulling the trigger.
The civilian panel voted to modify the LAPD’s use-of-force policy to comply with language contained in a state Supreme Court decision last year. The addition of a few words will call for examining whether decisions or actions by officers may have fueled confrontations that ended with the use of deadly force.
Currently, the commission does examine such pre-use-of-force actions. But it usually considers them separately from the moment of shooting when determining whether the use of deadly force was reasonable.
The new language, if given final approval, would consider the actions leading up to and including the use of force in their entirety.
“The clarification is significant,” Commissioner Robert Saltzman told the Los Angeles Times (https://lat.ms/1jDUX0N) before the vote. “Some have interpreted our current policy to suggest the commission should ignore all the officer’s pre-force activity, no matter how relevant those earlier actions are.”
For example, the commission reviewed the shooting of a mentally ill woman in November 2011.
The woman Kamisha Davidson, suffered from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. She was shot in the stomach during a fight with officers outside of her bedroom.
The Police Commission said officers should have waited for mental-health experts to arrive before entering the woman’s apartment, failed to have a plan for dealing with her and failed to handcuff her.
But the panel concluded that the shooting was justified based on the immediate confrontation, Los Angeles Times (https://lat.ms/1faEp1B) reported.
Findings that officers made mistakes “due to pre-shooting conduct have been extremely rare,” commission Inspector General Alexander Bustamante said in a report to the commission that recommended the change.
There may be “rare incidents where officers’ pre-shooting conduct precipitates a shooting that is negligent under California law. Likewise, there may be incidents where an officer’s pre-shooting conduct supports the reasonableness of a subsequent decision to use deadly force,” the report said.
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