CA- Fatal police shootings rose 70% in 2011.
Los Angeles, CA- The first deadly encounter of 2011 came quickly for police in Los Angeles County, when an officer killed an armed burglar on the second day of the year. The last person to be killed by police that year was shot a few days after Christmas in Palos Verdes after he allegedly beat his elderly father and pretended to point a gun at officers.
Between these ill-fated bookends, 52 other people throughout the county were shot fatally by police throughout 2011 — significantly more law enforcement killings than the county typically experiences. Compared with the prior year, the 54 deaths amounted to a nearly 70% increase.
The high number of killings last year underscores a pronounced jump in the overall number of occasions in which officers fired their weapons at suspects. For example, the 63 shootings by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department in 2011 were a nearly 60% increase over the previous year.
The rise in killings by police is all the more notable because it occurred at a time when the overall number of homicides in the area had fallen to historic lows. With 612 people killed in the county last year, nearly 1 in every 10 such deaths occurred at the hands of law enforcement officers.
The Times has analyzed autopsy reports from each of the 54 killings by police in L.A. County last year and identified elements that were common to many of them. The review also highlights the extreme, sudden dangers police can encounter in the field and may raise doubts about whether, in some instances, the officers were justified in their decision to open fire.
Among the findings:
• All but six of the fatal shootings involved officers from either the Los Angeles Police Department or the county's Sheriff Department, which, taken together, patrol the vast majority of the county's roughly 10 million people. The other six were committed by police in Long Beach, Downey and Santa Monica.
• In two-thirds of the cases, the person shot by police was armed with a gun, knife or other weapon, whereas in 12 cases, the person was unarmed. In the remaining few cases, it was not clear from the autopsy reports whether the person killed was armed.
• Eighteen of the shootings — one-third of the total — occurred when officers were dispatched to respond to a report of shots being fired, an armed suspect or an assault with a deadly weapon. In at least 12 of those cases, the person shot by police was armed with a gun, a knife or a realistic-looking replica of a gun. By contrast, 12 shootings were set in motion not with a call for help, but rather with an officer's choice to initiate contact with someone he believed was acting suspiciously. In seven of those cases, the person shot by police was armed with a weapon.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-cop-shootings-20120610,0,6928432.story