He shot at cops -- don’t forget it

A cop’s life is grudging with reward and heavy with risk, a state of affairs we accept as we strap on our guns and Kevlar vests and take to the streets. Though other civilian jobs may be more dangerous, only the police officer goes to work with the knowledge that someone may try to kill him or her merely for doing the job. Even this we accept as one of the costs of our chosen profession.

What is more difficult to accept is uninformed criticism that inevitably follows a police incident whose outcome is less than ideal. Rarely has such criticism been more irresponsible than that since the death of 19-month-old Suzie Marie Pena, who was killed by police gunfire during a July 10 hostage standoff in Watts. Her father, Jose Raul Pena, held the child in one arm while firing a semiautomatic pistol with his free hand. He was also killed.

One can understand and to some extent sympathize with the statements of the girl’s grieving mother, Lorena Lopez, who cannot accept that her chosen mate brought about the death of her child. “The police killed my daughter,” Lopez told reporters. “I want justice.”

Less forgivable, though predictable, are the pronouncements of outside interests in the case, such as lawyer Luis Carrillo and activist Najee Ali. Carrillo, who represents Pena’s family, no doubt hopes a pot of gold will emerge from their misfortune. And Ali has again demonstrated an eagerness to raise his profile by injecting himself into a police controversy, perhaps in the hope that the public’s memory of his criminal past will fade.

The misinformed opinions of politicians are another matter. Given their positions of responsibility, elected officials should be intelligent enough to know better. Some don’t. Leading the list, predictably, is Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), who released a statement critical of the police officers involved in the Pena shooting. “I just wonder,” the statement read, “if 11 well-trained police officers, including some from the sharpshooting elite SWAT team, could not have disabled this supposedly crazy and confused man.”

Thus Pena, who threatened to kill himself and his children and indeed fired several shots at his stepdaughter before she was rescued, is transformed from a brazen, murderous criminal into a morally benign “crazy and confused man,” one deserving of tender treatment from police officers even as he is shooting at them.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was just as unwilling to blame Pena for the death of his daughter. “All of us are caught up in this tragedy,” Villaraigosa told reporters. “All of us are devastated. But that’s why it’s important we step back a moment and allow the process to take place. We are going to get to the bottom of this.”

Is the mayor so afraid to make a moral judgment that he needs to “step back” and wait for the investigation of the shooting before concluding that it was Pena who was both morally and legally culpable for the death of his child?

The ignorance displayed by some members of the media in their coverage of the shooting has been as troubling. All too typical was the July 14 exchange between CNN’s Soledad O’Brien and David Klinger, a criminology professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a former LAPD officer. Why, O’Brien asked, did the police fire so many rounds at Pena? Why didn’t one officer simply shoot him in the leg?

Her questions revealed that whatever knowledge she may have of police work apparently has been gleaned from watching television dramas, few of which accurately capture the noise and confusion of a gunfight. How can the public be brought to understand this tragedy when the people who deliver the news are so poorly informed?

Sadly, such vacuity is the norm in television news, but we should expect more from our elected leaders. Unlike the mayor, the police officers of Los Angeles will not have the opportunity to “step back” before being thrust into their next deadly encounter. If that encounter results in the death of a police officer, will Villaraigosa and Waters and all the others be just as unwilling to assign the blame?