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July 12, 2005
LA Police Get it Exactly Right
A tragic situation occurred Monday in LA, where LA police officers shot and killed a man and his 19 month old daughter. (hat tip: Best of the Web)
The standoff started when officers were called to an intersection in South Los Angeles west of Watts where Pena was behaving erratically and aggressively.He fired at the officers and ran inside a fenced area that included his apartment and his car wash and detailing business. He had a 9 mm handgun and a shotgun and was intoxicated on drugs and alcohol, police said.
Police called in a special weapons team and tried to talk to the man. At one point, as officers helped a neighbor escape, he fired at them and they fired back, police said.
[the following text was actually earlier in the referenced article]
"You aren't going to stand there with somebody shooting at you," Bratton said. "The person responsible for any loss of life ... was the individual who held his child out as a shield and continued to shoot."
The situation, as I said, is tragic. Yet the police had it exactly right: Jose Pena (the father) was posing a danger to the entire area, having already shot at least one police officer. How would it be if the officers, for fear of hurting the child, had not returned fire? Well, the first bad thing would be that anyone killed by Pena at that point would have been killed because of police inaction. The much worse and longer-term effect would be that criminals would be tempted to kidnap small children to use as shields, leading in the long run to more children being killed.
That said, if it turns out that it was the police, not Pena, who fired the shot that killed the child (an autopsy apparently has yet to be performed), those officers involved will be haunted by this their entire lives. That is a further tragic cost of such incidents as this.
By the way, I'd like to commend CBS for their article: that is how news reports should be written; there was no editorializing, and the entire incident was portrayed without sensationalism and in a "just the facts" manner. This is how reporting is supposed to be done.
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Comments
Good call Jeff.
The only criticism that should be directed at the LAPD over this incident is perhaps a need to invest in a larger number of professionally trained snipers for their TAC units.
Posted by: mark safranski at July 13, 2005 12:22 AM