It has been said that the police officer on the beat is the most powerful person in the American justice system. More powerful than a congressman who makes laws, more powerful than a senator, even more powerful than a judge on the United States Supreme Court. This is because a police officer on the street has the complete power over a person’s life. With his baton he can send a man to the hospital, simply by stating that the man resisted his will. With his pen, he can deprive a man of his personal freedom, simply by stating that he observed a violation of a penal code. However, perhaps the most awesome power that a police officer has is attached to his belt, the power to take a human life with his gun. The police officer’s “licence to kill” comes with virtually no legal accountability; a successful criminal prosecution of a police officer involved in a shooting is so rare as to be virtually nonexistent in American jurisprudence. Similarly rare, though more common than criminal accountability, is any form of adverse professional consequences for an officer who kills an individual in the line of duty. When a police officer kills an unarmed man, almost certainly, nothing will happen to him. He will not face any form of criminal prosecution, and, more likely than not, there will be no professional consequences whatsoever imposed on him.

To anyone who has devoted a career to the litigation of officer involved shootings, the reasons for the lack of police accountability become clear. The first main reason is simply a matter of analyzing the mechanics the officer involved shooting, and the reality is simple: police officers are usually the only surviving witnesses who are willing to testify as to how a fatal officer involved shooting occurred. As the only voice to tell the story of how a killing happened, a police officer fights an unopposed battle on the issue of credibility because only a single version of events is reported. However, when these cases are looked at in the aggregate, the robotic nature of the script that is used to justify the shooting of unarmed men strains the credibility of even an unopposed version of events. This is because the justification for the shooting is always the same. When a police officer shoots an unarmed man from a distance, even when his victim is shot in the back, he will always say the man who was killed was reaching for his waistband, a story often accompanied by police reports and testimony that employ such rarely used descriptive phrases as “furtive gesture”, when describing a decedent’s actions. When a police officer shoots an unarmed man at close range, regardless of the bullet trajectories or amount of shots fired, he will always say the victim was reaching for his gun. When a police officer shoots into a motor vehicle, he will always say the driver was attempting to run him over, notwithstanding the obvious physical evidence to the contrary, marked by the trajectory of bullets shot into the sides of vehicles, demonstrating that the shooting officers could not have been in the path of the targeted vehicle when the shots were fired.