Phenix City is typical of many communities where fatal police encounters with motorists have occurred over the past five years. It would have been impossible, he said, for Mifflin to have been headed for Seavers when the shots were fired. Jeremy Bauer, a forensics expert in Seattle who has testified for police departments nationwide and for families of people killed, reviewed the state investigative report, witness testimony, photographs and other materials and concluded that the officer had not been in peril. Phenix City and state officials have declined to release police body- and dashboard-camera videos of the fatal encounter. Seavers faced no charges in the Mifflin case. Yet prosecutors found that the claim that officers feared for their lives or the lives of others was enough to justify all but the rarest of shootings. In some cases the vehicle was stationary, even incapable of moving. Some officers who fatally shot motorists didn’t appear to be in any jeopardy at all, the Times review showed.

“In the high 90 percentile of cases I’ve seen, the person’s just trying to get away.” “You see many where bullets are in the back of the car, in the side of the car,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina who has researched high-risk police activities for more than 30 years.

Often, the drivers were trying to get away from officers, edging around them, not toward them, the footage shows, and the officers weren’t in the path of the vehicle when they fired. Or they reached into cars and became entangled with motorists, then opened fire. Nine officers have been fatally run over, pinned or dragged by drivers in vehicles approached for minor or nonviolent offenses in the past five years.īut in many instances, local police officers, state troopers and sheriff’s deputies put themselves at risk by jumping in front of moving cars, then aiming their guns at the drivers as if in a Hollywood movie, according to body-camera footage. “If you think the vehicle is coming toward you, get yourself out of the way.”

Bad to do,” said Carmen Best, the former Seattle police chief. The risk of injuring innocent people is considered too great the idea of stopping a car with a bullet is viewed as wishful thinking. Department of Justice has warned against the practice for decades, pressuring police departments to forbid it. The country’s largest cities, from New York to Los Angeles, have barred officers from shooting at moving vehicles.

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