The policeman’s predicament: When to shoot?

The police head out each day prepared to deal with the worst of the worst in our society. They are armed and trained to uphold the law, protect and serve.

Sometimes they must use deadly force, and make that life-altering decision in a split-second.  Because of their unique responsibility, we give the police appropriate latitude in enforcing the law.

That latitude, however, has boundaries, and those lines certainly appear to have been crossed in the shooting of Walter Scott by police officer Michael Slager in North Charleston, S.C.

Scott ran from his car following a routine traffic stop by Slager for a broken taillight. A witness says a tussle followed. When Scott broke away and fled, Slager shot and killed him. Scott was not armed.

Slager is charged with murder, but not that many years ago the police had greater leeway in shooting a fleeing suspect. That changed with the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1985 decision in Tennessee v. Garner where a Memphis police officer shot and killed an unarmed teenage burglar.

The high court determined the shooting constituted a “seizure subject to the Fourth Amendment’s reasonableness requirement.” Writing for the majority, Justice Byron White wrote, “Such force may not be used unless it is necessary to prevent the escape and (emphasis added) the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”

A subsequent case, Graham v. Conner in 1989, reinforced the earlier finding, but it also provided some clarity as to what constitutes a reasonable action on the part of the officer.

“The ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight,” wrote Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

That language provides some latitude to police officers who, according to Rehnquist, “are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”

Those cases help explain why a grand jury did not indict police officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. (Brown tussled with Wilson and grabbed for his gun). And they explain why prosecutors appear to have a good case against Slager, who shot an unarmed man who was running away.

In Tennessee v. Garner, the court said, “It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape,” striking down the common-law notion that it’s OK for the police to shoot at a suspect just because they are fleeing.

Walter Scott made a poor decision when he jumped from his car and tried to run away, but it should not have cost him his life.





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