When Los Angeles police officers unleashed a barrage of bullets early Monday into the car of a robbery suspect, killing him, five TV helicopters hovered above, beaming the scene into the homes of thousands of viewers.
Puffs of smoke could be seen as the officers fired their handguns into the car of Nicholas Killinger, 23, who toppled face down into the street in front of Santa Monica High School. Killinger, who was suspected of tying up a gas station attendant at knifepoint near Malibu and taking US$180 from his cash register, died an hour later.
While police pursuits are a staple of broadcast fare in freeway-laced Los Angeles and its environs, televised killings are not, and the latest shooting has revived a debate not only about what is proper to show on the local news but about how and when police should use their weapons in a chase.
Already under fire for its approach to using deadly force, the Los Angeles Police Department is struggling to revise a policy on pursuits and how to end them. Last June, Police Chief William Bratton ordered his officers to stop chasing drivers for traffic infractions or low-grade misdemeanors. In the six months that followed, the number of pursuits dropped 66 percent.
In the wake of the latest shooting, Bratton has reiterated his intent to review the deadly-force guidelines, which allow officers to shoot at vehicles that pose a threat. In the Killinger case, three officers appeared to react to the fact that the driver, who had been eluding law enforcement officers from various jurisdictions for more than an hour, stopped as he was trying a U-turn and then backed his white Ford Tempo into the front of a patrol car. The officers fired about 11 rounds.
It is not clear if the officers knew that Killinger was convicted last year for assault with a deadly weapon, although their knowledge of his suspected actions in the gas station earlier on Monday probably gave them sufficient reason to expect that he would be violent, said Geoffrey Alpert, a professor in criminology at the University of South Carolina.
"If a fleeing suspect has committed a crime that doesn't involve the use of violence, then a pursuit may not be justified because of the risk to the officers, the public and even the fleeing suspect," Alpert said in a telephone interview. "But if it's a carjacker or a rapist, it raises the level of risk that officers are allowed to take."
If the officers who fired at Killinger concluded that he was backing up his car "in a violent manner," Alpert said, that would be enough to justify firing at him in self-defense.
Los Angeles Police Department spokeswoman Kristi Sandoval said on Tuesday that Bratton and his staff were considering adopting some pursuit-ending procedures used by the California Highway Patrol, including laying spike strips on roads and bumping suspects' cars so that they spin out of control.
"We want to try to eliminate the pursuits being controlled by the suspect," Sandoval said, "so we can stop the pursuit on our terms."
Last year, there were 579 police pursuits -- 100 fewer than the previous year -- in Los Angeles, a city with a population of 3.8 million.
As the competition between local TV stations has become more intense, helicopters have given viewers a bird's-eye view of every conceivable event, with high-speed chases often the most dramatic. Since 1998, when a man was shown shooting himself on a highway overpass, some stations have tried to be more circumspect.
On Monday morning, as officers fired at Killinger, some of the airborne camera crews pulled back to a wide-angle view, to reduce the close-up detail on viewers' screens.
"You did not see him get shot on our air," Robert Long, news director of KNBC-TV, said in an interview. "It could have happened, but we have good people who know how to read these things."
Long said that he had directed his staff not to broadcast car chases unless there is "something extraordinary."
"It has to rise to the level of news, and not just something you can't take your eyes off of," he said.
Early last year, Bratton asked news directors informally to reduce or even halt their coverage of police pursuits, under the premise that they were treated as entertainment and that the broadcasts could encourage flight by suspects who want a moment in the spotlight. Many recall the day when, on the day he was supposed to turn himself in on murder charges, O.J. Simpson led police along the San Diego Freeway that was televised around the country.
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