Dreadful Statistic: 3 in a Year

Officer Brian Brown didn’t have a chance Sunday night when he responded to gunfire on Centinela Avenue near the Los Angeles-Culver City border. Shortly after a young man was shot to death, he and his partner saw a suspect with a rifle in a Honda. During a pursuit of the car, Brown was mortally wounded. He became the third member of the Police Department to die in the line of duty in less than a year.

Other officers fatally wounded one suspect in the Honda near the Fox Hills Mall. The second suspect hijacked a taxi and drove it to Los Angeles International Airport. After he struck some parked cars and fled on foot at Terminal 1, he was shot and wounded.

Police Chief Bernard C. Parks said he will tolerate no second-guessing over whether police officers did the right thing when they shot the suspect in the arrival area at LAX. Parks said his officers protected themselves and thousands of travelers at the airport on one of the busiest travel nights of the year. No bystanders were hurt.

No gun was found at the airport, but police did recover two rifles from the other crime scenes. The seized rifles are a reminder that LAPD officers often remain outgunned even though their weapons and ammunition have been upgraded since the 1997 North Hollywood bank shootout.

Authorities are seeking the facts of the Brown killing; gang affiliation, if any, of the two men shot by police; details of the police gunfights and the shooting at LAX. All this will help recon-struct how a young officer, who as a Marine in Somalia won a Purple Heart rescuing members of his unit, lost his life fighting crime in Los Angeles.

Officer Brown, 27, had been on the force barely three years. A single father, he is survived by his son, Dylon, 7. His colleagues in the LAPD’s Pacific Division have canceled their Christmas party, and funding for it will be donated instead to a trust fund for the boy, the right thing to do in honor of a war hero willing to perform the dangerous work that the safety of the city requires.