Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch was deficient when she released her office’s finding that a police officer’s use of force this past summer in a Senatobia store’s parking lot was justified, even though it resulted in the accidental shooting death of a 1-year-old child.
Fitch and her assistants had to know that such a highly-charged incident of police violence was not going to be widely excused on their word alone.
It took a leak to a news outlet of some videos from the scene of the shooting to prompt the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, which investigated the case, to produce three days later what should have been made available with the attorney general’s conclusion.
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The release of multiple videos from the officers’ body cameras and from the Walmart store’s surveillance cameras appear to support the finding that the officer who fired into a vehicle attempting to flee the scene of a reported shoplifting did not commit a crime. The fleeing vehicle came dangerously close to hitting him and, in the heat of those frantic seconds, could have led him to believe that he and some of the other four officers with him were in mortal danger.
What it doesn’t exonerate, though, is the conduct by the lawmen that led to such a dangerous and ultimately tragic moment.
Five officers — two Tate County sheriff’s deputies and three officers from the Senatobia Police Department — were in the discount store June 14 investigating an unrelated crime when they were alerted of a shoplifting in progress.
This was not a violent crime. Nor was anyone at risk of injury until the five officers chased after the alleged perpetrators and drew their weapons when the panicking driver refused their orders to stop. The officer who fired the fatal shots put himself in harm’s way when he positioned himself facing the front of the fleeing car in trying to halt its progress — something that multiple police experts told Mississippi Today goes against standard law enforcement training.
Firing four times into the vehicle, including at least once through the passenger’s side window, compounded his misjudgment. He may not have known that a child was in his mother’s lap in the passenger seat, but he should not have been shooting at the driver in the first place. Had he killed her with the car in motion, the vehicle most likely would not have come to an immediate stop. It would have kept moving through the parking lot, putting other property and people at risk.
Certainly, the fleeing women were at fault, too. Shoplifting, if that’s what they were doing, is a bad decision. Shoplifting with an infant in tow is a doubly bad one.
But they could have been held accountable for this in a less aggressive manner, once the officers saw the vehicle was not going to stop. The officers had a visual description of the car and could have recorded its license plate. Armed with that and the knowledge that Walmart’s surveillance cameras would have recorded everything that these women did inside the store, they could have located them and made arrests later, no guns involved.
It’s easy, we acknowledge, to second-guess law enforcement officers after the fact. They have a difficult and often dangerous job that requires split-second decisions.
But that’s also why they go through extensive training. They are taught to envision all the possible scenarios when arriving on a crime scene or attempting to make an arrest. They are taught how best to protect themselves and others, including bystanders. They are also taught that the force they display or use should be commensurate with the severity of the situation they face.
A failure to follow this training escalated what should have been the routine handling of a routine crime into an infant’s senseless death, both dividing a community and drawing unfavorable national notice. It was so unnecessary.
