Officer-Involved
Shootings

A police shooting record runs in three spans, and only the middle one holds the shots. Before it sit the decisions that shaped the encounter; after it sit aid, the investigation and the officers' accounts.

The first span is the approach. It holds the decision to approach at all, where the officer stood in relation to cover, a doorway or a vehicle, whether distance was closed or kept, whether and when the officer drew a firearm, and whether a supervisor was directing the approach or learned of it afterward. Each of those decisions is read on what the officer knew when it was made, from dispatch onward and without hindsight, against what the agency's policy said about that kind of approach and what the training file shows was taught.

A supervisor who directed the approach is read the same way, against what the policy assigned to a supervisor on scene. Where the officer knew beforehand that the person being approached was in crisis, the approach is also a question for mental-health and crisis encounters.

The same span shows which choices were still open to the officer as the encounter developed, and whether the approach itself had narrowed them. Whether the officer's training called for slowing an approach or holding a position is answered from the training file, and the Library's guide to what de-escalation standards require explains the doctrine behind that question. For counsel defending the officer, this span matters in the same way: an approach the policy permitted and positioning consistent with training are findings just as a departure is, and the Library covers what being retained by both sides requires of a report.

How the law treats decisions made before a shooting is not a practices question, and legal conclusions remain counsel's. For an officer-involved shooting expert witness, the reason to read the approach is narrower: it is in the record, and where the agency's policy or the officer's training addressed it, the conduct can be measured against what was required. Where neither did, the measure is generally accepted police practices. The record a use of force expert witness reads in any force case, from the policy in force that day to the review that followed, is laid out stage by stage on its own page.

Three questions follow the last shot, and each is taken up in full elsewhere: whether aid was summoned and rendered as the agency's policy required, at failure to intervene and render aid; how the shooting was investigated, in the officer-involved shooting investigation protocol guide; and when and how the officers' accounts were taken, at officer statements after a use of force. The last two of those reach back into the first two spans. The investigation is meant to preserve recordings and identify witnesses, and the accounts taken after a shooting are one of the sources for what the officer knew during the approach and when the decision to fire was made.

The aftermath also holds the agency's own review of the shooting. Its file answers whether that review reached the approach as well as the decision to fire, and what it found about each. How those reviews are convened and what their records show is described at force review boards.

An officer-involved shooting expert witness does not answer the scientific and medical questions a shooting file raises: shot trajectories, wound paths, firearm function and the medical cause of death are deferred to qualified experts in those disciplines, as are human factors questions. Where one of their findings bears on a practices question, the report attributes it to the expert who made it and does not adopt it as its own. When a shooting ends in a death, the wrongful death claim that follows is taken up in police wrongful death cases.

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