Shoot first: ask questions later.

• Author: Riggs, Mike
• Position: Citings - Brief article

IN 2010, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) had a 50 percent increase in the number of "perception" shootings--shootings in which "deputies perceive, accurately or not, that a suspect may be armed or going for a gun" and then fire their own weapons. According to a report compiled for the department by the Police Assessment Resource Center, a non-profit group that analyzes local and state police agencies, "A little more than half of those suspects were holding an object such as a cell phone or sunglasses that was believed by deputies to be a possible firearm."

LASD deputies fired on 260 people from 2005 through 2010. Sixty-one percent of those shootings involved suspects who were later determined to be unarmed. "Waistband shootings," in which suspects were fired upon after reaching toward their waists, increased from one-fifth of all incidents to one-third. In almost half of those incidents...