More than 50 officers involved in fatal shootings this year had fired guns in past deadly encounters
About one in eight fatal shootings by police in 2015 involved at least one officer who had taken part in previously deadly shootings, a newspaper investigation has found.
The Washington Post derived its statistics from 367 deadly police shootings for which police agencies provided information. The paper had sought information on 743 fatal police shootings from January to September, but police departments did not offer information in 376 cases.
Fifty-five police officers involved in fatal shootings in 2015 had previously fired their guns in deadly encounters, the Post said. Forty-five officers had previously been involved in nonfatal shootings.
Most of the officers involved in repeat shootings are patrol officers who “are often the first to respond to tense situations including domestic disputes and calls to help someone with mental illness,” the newspaper says. Many others are officers assigned to specialized units such as SWAT and narcotics teams.
In most cases, the suspect killed was armed.
The Post says its analysis “exposed another gap in the federal government’s oversight of fatal police shootings nationwide: the absence of a system for tracking multiple shootings by individual officers.”
