The LAPD Made a Meaningful Change to the Rules Governing Deadly Force

By making a slight change to its policy on officers who fire their weapons, the Los Angeles Police Commission, which acts as a board of directors for the Los Angeles Police Department, took a big step this month toward improving how LAPD officers deal with the mentally ill.

Since the 1970s, the commission's review process for officer-involved shootings—any incident in which an officer fires his or her weapon—has broken events surrounding such shootings into separate moments in time, and then determined the appropriateness and legality of each moment in isolation. But that approach has historically enabled the commission to occasionally clear officers, even when the officers' behavior may have sparked a situation where deadly force was needed in the first place. The L.A. Times' Joel Rubin reports that this is essentially what happened with the 2011 shooting of Kamisha Davidson.