The danger looks bigger the closer you are

No chance Huntington Beach cops were going to be charged in the fatal shooting of a young woman who ran at them with a knife. The Orange County D.A.’s office made it official Thursday, saying the two patrolmen were justified in pumping 15 shots into 18-year-old Ashley MacDonald’s chest last August.

I wrote at the time that the cops would skate and I still have the sense that there must have been a way to disable a young woman, high on methamphetamines, short of killing her. But rather than rehash that, I phoned an LAPD cop I’ve exchanged e-mails with on an unrelated criminal case.

He’s a nine-year veteran, with most of his assignments in L.A.’s most violent neighborhoods.

Even though he has no involvement in the case, I asked him if he could give us an insight into what the Huntington Beach police might have been thinking since the shooting. He said he could make educated guesses. Because we so seldom get cops to tell us in unfiltered language what it’s like inside the shop, I agreed to give him anonymity.

He’s been involved in several shootings, he says, but never killed anyone. But that was more a matter of the suspect’s luck than his restraint, he says. And in his situations, he says, he’s had no remorse.

The Huntington Beach scenario is totally different, he says.

“I dread ever being in a situation of suicide by cop,” he says, referring to MacDonald’s alleged command for cops to shoot her. He has relatives with mental problems and knows they can transform from regular to erratic.

“I always wonder, ‘What would I do?’ ” he says of the possibility of confronting a clearly mentally troubled assailant. “But at some point, you ask, ‘How long am I going to think about it? How much of my life or someone else’s life am I going to risk for someone I don’t want to shoot?’ ”

The cop thinks he has a feel for what happened in the aftermath of the shooting. “I think people think when police shoot someone, they might be proud, or that it’s a notch in their belt. Not at all. Not at all. I don’t care if you’re a cowboy or not. I’ve been in several shootings; there’s no cowboy, no tough guys out there who are going to think this is a notch in their belt. I don’t even have to know these guys [in Huntington Beach] to know that.”

He contrasts that with an LAPD cop who killed the man who shot another officer. “He’s a legend,” the cop says.

Most likely, the Huntington Beach cops’ general reaction would have been, “Those poor guys. What a tough spot to be in.”

Some fellow officers might have offered condolences. Others might have kept their distance, fearful of saying the wrong thing. He guarantees that small groups of cops would have talked about the shooting, which occurred in a city park at 7:45 a.m. They would have pumped each other for information about what they’d heard. That would have segued into asking each other and themselves how they would have handled it. The shooting likely would have been talked about at roll call, he says.

And no, he says, it is not automatic that there would be 100% agreement that lethal force was required. But even if there wouldn’t have been unanimity, cops would adhere to the belief that unless you were there, you can’t be sure what you’d do.

So, not only do cops say that to the public, they say it among themselves.

“When you’re not there, everyone knows it’s so different,” he says. He riffs on reading reports about cases that, on paper, may not have sounded all that threatening but in real-life seemed much more so. He cites one of his cases in which he saw a suspect toss a gun into a trash barrel and was sure it was a large TEC-9 handgun. Turned out to be a small pistol. Similarly, bad guys with whom he’s had to fight seemed much bigger than they actually were.

A knife, he says, “probably looks twice as big when someone is coming at you with it.” Authorities described MacDonald as wielding a knife with a 3-inch handle and 4-inch blade, with serrated edges.

I tell him that many readers have asked why nonlethal force wasn’t used.

He concedes that he asked the same question when he read the news accounts, but reiterated that things happen quickly and that the moment of truth may have been just that.

And then he raised interesting what-if scenarios. What if an officer tried to disarm MacDonald and got a sliced tendon in his hand and could no longer work? Or a stab wound that blinded him? “When you’re in that situation, whether she’s on drugs or just hates cops, the result is the same: if she hurts you, she hurts you.”

As a result, he says, cops are trained to play it by the book. The book says that when confronted by lethal force, like a knife, you draw your gun, order the suspect to stop, and fire at the largest part of the body if you fear for your life.

Then he raises other interesting scenarios. Let’s say a cop decided not to fire and instead cracked a suspect in the head and caused serious injury. Or drove the squad car into a suspect to disable her. A cop may well fear potential litigation, he says, because cracking someone’s head or running over them aren’t in the manual.

You mean a cop who chooses to disable someone rather than kill them might get in trouble? Very possible, he says.

Departmental policy or the threat of later lawsuits, he says, can constrict cops. “It’s always difficult to remain a fluid thinker when you’re constantly guided by policies that try to make a science out of something that is not science,” he says.

Being cleared by the Orange County D.A. doesn’t mean Huntington Beach cops are saying, ‘I told you so,’ the cop says. If some cops questioned the use of lethal force, they still might. But the cop draws a distinction between possible disagreement with the level of force used and condemnation of the cops who killed MacDonald.

He says he can’t venture an opinion about a lesser level of force because he doesn’t know all the details. And that brings us back around to where his frustrations and the public’s frustrations converge.

Nobody wanted the girl to die. Everybody is rehashing how it happened. My guy is frustrated that police don’t do a better job of explaining themselves and that the rest of us don’t do a better job of understanding police.

“There’s just so much to get across to people,” he says.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.