Shooting of 13-Year-Old Creates Questions, Pain

Re “LAPD Speeds Policy on Shots at Vehicles,” Feb. 9: If Officer Steve Garcia lacked the agility to move out of the way of a slowly backing car, it would seem he lacked the physical qualifications to be a police officer. If he fired 10 shots at the car, and five of them went astray, it would seem he lacked the marksmanship skills necessary to be a police officer.

He claimed he feared the backing car would strike and damage the police cruiser. If that is the case, he seems to place more value on an automobile than a human life. If any of these things are true, at best it would seem he is not qualified to be a police officer and should be dismissed; at worst, criminal charges should be brought against him.

Also, I cannot understand why, as Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton claims, it takes so monumentally long to change police policies in regard to firing at moving vehicles.

Theodore C. Henderson

Los Angeles

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Policies that are mere words on paper will not change officers’ performances in critical field situations. A series of L.A. police chiefs over the last several decades has allowed investigations of officers’ uses of force to be exercises designed to prove the propriety of officers’ actions rather than an objective pursuit of truth.

When the investigations do expose wrongdoing, chiefs have tortured logic until even the most egregious actions are described as tactical errors rather than policy violations.

We all should be sympathetic to the dangerous milieu within which today’s street cop operates. Failure to take direct and decisive corrective action when officers’ actions fail to meet appropriate standards, however, deprives other officers of clear and unambiguous guidance for their future actions.

David D. Dotson

San Juan Capistrano

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Re “Black Leaders Express Anger at Boy’s Death,” Feb. 8: A teenage boy steals a car, gets tailed by police, panics and keeps driving. Why doesn’t he stop? Because he’s grown up knowing one thing: If you’re black and the police are chasing you, if they catch up, they will pump you full of bullets. He was right.

Winston Steward

Los Angeles

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Has it occurred to any of the outraged citizens in the community that the 13-year-old boy in question would be alive today had he not been out joyriding at 3 o’clock in the morning?

The responsibility for this child’s death does not lie solely in the hands of the police. The morals and values instilled in this child by his family and community are as much in need of reevaluation and debate as are the policies and behavior of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Jim Hergenrather

Los Angeles

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I was a single parent raising a son in an affluent, all-white area of San Diego in the 1970s. It was a challenge. While a teen, he stole a car and went joyriding for a week. I can’t describe the concern and worry that I felt during his teenage years.

He is now 39, has a bachelor’s degree cum laude and is a couple of courses from a master’s. He has three well-behaved children, and he’s active in his church. The people from whom my son stole the car did not press charges. The police “sentenced” him to washing police cars on weekends.

When I see the grief on the face of Devin Brown’s godmother, I thank God that I did not have to share her grief. Were things different for us because we were white, living in an upscale neighborhood? How would my son have turned out had he been exposed to the environment that was Devin Brown’s life? Grief is grief. Black grief hurts as much as white grief. Devin Brown is some mother’s son. My heart bleeds for her.

Dianne Safford

Port Hueneme

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With the current racial situations that have plagued this state, i.e., the Simi Valley beating (“Teen Sentenced for Simi Hate Crime,” Feb. 4) and the shooting of a 13-year-old boy, one has to wonder where this country is headed. This month, we are celebrating black history, and only nine days into the month the community is mourning the death of a young black male who was shot because an officer felt “his life was threatened,” and all the community hears is that another internal investigation is underway.

It almost seems as if this is the rural 1960 South all over again. Well, as they say, “the hands of time are slowly moving backward.”

Steven A. Webb

Winnetka