Damon Root on Fatal Police Shootings and Self-Serving Police Narratives

Last week The New York
Times published a widely read op-ed titled “How the Supreme
Court Protects Bad Cops.” According to the author, one of the key
ways SCOTUS shields the police is by consistently extending the
benefit of the doubt to law enforcement agents who employ deadly
force against criminal suspects. Thanks to such deferential
decisions, the op-ed declared, the high court has made it “very
difficult, and often impossible, to hold police officers and the
governments that employ them accountable for civil rights
violations.”

Perhaps the Supreme Court should take a few pointers from the
U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit,
suggests Reason Senior Editor Damon Root. Last
Thursday that court refused to let one California police department
off the hook for a fatal shooting that claimed the life of an
unarmed suspect. Declining to accept at face value what he
characterized as the “self-serving” police narrative, 9th Circuit
Chief Judge Alex Kozinski ruled that not only is there reason to
doubt the officers’ version of the facts; there is reason to
“conclude that the officers lied.”

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