Editorial: If the U.S. government won’t fight to end police shootings, who will?

His name was Jordan Edwards. He was just 15, a good student and popular athlete at Mesquite High School in the Dallas suburb of Balch Springs. His death Saturday night was senseless, sudden and cruel. It came as he was leaving a party and was struck in the head by a bullet fired from a rifle into the side window of a car in which he rode beside his older brother.

The assailant was a police officer, whose reason for pulling the trigger — whose reason for raising a rifle in the first place, or even for carrying such a powerful weapon at all while responding to nothing more serious than complaints about drunken partygoers — is (pending further investigation) anyone’s guess. The Balch Springs Police Department’s first story was that Jordan’s brother was backing the car toward the officer in “an aggressive manner” when the officer fired the rifle, but video of the incident showed that particular tale to be false. More information may come from other officers at the scene, but questioning was postponed while they were given time, according to a police spokesman, to “decompress.”

Fatal police shootings of unarmed African American men — and boys, like Jordan Edwards — have fueled righteous anger across the nation and have led many to claim that police departments are stocked with racial bigots bent on state-sanctioned murder. It is far more likely that officers who needlessly kill are very much like a majority of us — affected by unconscious and unwanted biases built into our history and culture, and lacking in the extraordinary skill, training and presence of mind that should be (but often are not) mandatory for professionals who wear badges, carry guns and are called upon to protect public safety by making split-second decisions under stressful circumstances.

In the end, though, the underlying reasons for unwarranted police killings are almost beside the point when the deadly results are the same. Too many police departments in small cities like Balch Springs, Texas, or Ferguson, Mo., and even large ones like Baltimore, Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, fail in hiring, training, supervising and psychologically evaluating their officers. Too many departments are stuck in outdated tactics, despite a wealth of data and information about best practices. Too many police stop, search and arrest — and kill — blacks and Latinos in far greater numbers than whites in response to similar behavior. What’s more, department rules are relatively lenient toward officers who use their weapons, and criminal prosecution of unnecessary shootings is uncommon, leading to a culture in which police officers may feel confident they won’t be held accountable for their missteps.

In his second term, President Obama took some meek and tentative steps to bring policing practices up to date. The Department of Justice entered into consent decrees with agencies whose practices routinely violated the civil rights of those they policed. Many officers and their unions bristled at what they saw as outside interference. Many department and city leaders welcomed the assistance.

But federal help and pressure have now evaporated under the administration of President Trump and Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions, whose statements and directives reveal a stunningly shallow view of policing as a war between cops and criminals, and who see desperate attempts to curb police failures like the one that ended the life of Jordan Edwards as aid and comfort to the enemy.

We are left to rely on the too-often unreliable rectitude of police departments like the one in Balch Springs, which over the weekend said in effect that the victim had it coming to him. And on tools such as video, which on Monday compelled the department to retract its story and led the chief to acknowledge that shooting an unarmed teenager in the head with a rifle as his car was moving away from officers failed to meet the department’s “core values.” We are left to wonder why officers who witnessed the killing are accorded time to decompress before questioning, and to imagine how differently police might treat civilian triggermen and eyewitnesses.

Police have cautioned against over-reliance on video, even as many agencies have moved rapidly to equip officers with body cameras. They have resisted clear guidelines for when such images should be released to the public. (The Balch Springs video has not yet been released.) They have relied for the most part on their own counsel when deciding what weapons to carry and when to use them.

Without national leadership, and with courts that accord officers wide latitude, pressure to reform policing comes in the form of public anger. It is a dangerous, unfocused, unmanageable, unpredictable force — as those of us who were in Los Angeles 25 years ago well remember. Surely we can do better, but we struggle to figure out just how.

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