from SLATE:
>>The FBI's Nearly Unbelievable Record of "Justified" Shootings
By Josh Voorhees
Posted Wednesday, June 19, 2013, at 10:19 AM
We're still waiting for the FBI to finish its internal investigation
into exactly what happened in an Orlando apartment last month, when an
FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a Chechan [i.e.,
Chechnyan] man who knew Boston bombing suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
Since the shooting, unnamed officials have painted a number of
different pictures of the scene in the room in the moments before the
agent opened fire. Among them, that Todashev was unarmed, that he was
brandishing a knife, and that he was carrying a pipe or maybe a
broomstick.
For all the current uncertainty surrounding exactly what led the agent
to shoot and kill Todashev, the bureau's next step appears almost a
foregone conclusion: Based on recent history, the FBI's final report
is all but certain to conclude that the shooting was justified. The
New York Times with the agency's eye-raising track record:
>[F]rom 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70
"subjects" and wounded about 80 others — and every one of those
episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal
F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of
Information Act lawsuit. The last two years have followed the same
pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no
findings of improper intentional shootings. ...
>Out of 289 deliberate shootings covered by the documents, many of
which left no one wounded, five were deemed to be "bad shoots," in
agents' parlance — encounters that did not comply with the bureau's
policy, which allows deadly force if agents fear that their lives or
those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical punishment involved
adding letters of censure to agents' files. But in none of the five
cases did a bullet hit anyone.<
Depending on how you read those numbers—more than 150 shootings that
wounded or killed a subject in the past 20 years, all justified; 284
deliberate shootings in all, 279 justified—that's either an
extraordinary track record, or an unbelievable one. Regardless, it
raises some obvious red flags about the fairness and validity of those
internal reviews. Perhaps as troubling, as the Times explains, is that
in most of those cases the FBI internal investigation was the only
inquiry into the shooting, as it currently is in the Orlando incident.
Go check out the full NYT piece here
[http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/19/us/in-150-shootings-the-fbi-deemed-agents-faultless.html],
which also breaks down the conflicting accounts of a 2002 shooting the
agency declared justified that independent investigators weren't so
sure about. (During the episode in question an agent shot an innocent
Maryland man in the head after mistaking him for a bank robber.) <<
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your
own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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