Police Shootings

Two U.S. Border Patrol agents were watching the Mexican boundary last year when they stopped a van carrying 743 pounds of marijuana. The driver fled back across the Rio Grande -- with a gunshot wound in his buttocks. Federal prosecutors convinced a jury in March that the agents had shot a defenseless man and schemed to cover it up. Much of the evidence against them came from the drug runner, Osvaldo Aldrete-Davila, who reported the shooting to a friend at the Border Patrol in Arizona.

Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck is under fire from his civilian bosses, who increasingly are troubled by his reluctance to punish officers they found had killed or wounded people unjustifiably. "If this pattern continues, it could undermine the entire discipline system and undermine the authority of the commission," said Robert Saltzman, a member of the Police Commission and associate dean at USC's law school. "It runs the risk of sending the message to officers that there will be no consequences.

The Justice Department's civil rights division said Thursday it had found insufficient evidence to prosecute four white Riverside police officers involved in the 1998 shooting death of a 19-year-old black woman who passed out in her car with a gun in her lap. "Tyisha Miller's death was a terrible tragedy," said Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. Gerald Boyd.

NEW YORK - Michael Maloney was just eight days from retiring as police chief of the tiny town of Greenland, N.H. - just eight days from leaving 26 years in law enforcement for the freedom to golf, fish, enjoy his family and maybe find another job. But there was one thing he needed to do. It was a thankless task: helping to serve a warrant on a man with a rap sheet that included assault and drug charges. And it was the kind of job Maloney insisted on doing himself rather than leaving to others, say those who knew the chief, who was killed by a bullet to the head as he carried out his final mission Thursday.

A man wielding a samurai-style sword killed two people and wounded three others at an Irvine supermarket Sunday before his bloody rampage ended with a fatal volley of police gunfire. The deadly attack occurred about 9:35 a.m. inside the Albertsons at Culver Drive and Irvine Boulevard, when Joseph Parker, a 30-year-old bagger known for erratic behavior, entered the market where he worked and began slashing employees and customers, witnesses said.

On their final night alive, Kevin and Joni Park checked into a bluff-top bungalow at one of the West Coast's toniest resorts packing a gun and a bag of ammunition. The Mission Viejo couple used a fake name, police said, and paid for their $2,200-a-night lodgings in cash. They brought piles of money and boxes of mysterious documents.

The serial killer who terrorized a South Carolina community by shooting five people to death before police killed him Monday was a career criminal paroled just two months ago, authorities said. Patrick Burris, 41, was shot to death by officers investigating a burglary complaint at a home in Gastonia, N.C., 30 miles from where the killing rampage started June 27.

Re "Police Shootings," letter, April 13: I have been a police officer for over 10 years. It has never been the policy of either agency I have worked for to "shoot to kill." Leonard Burney asks the question, why do police shoot to kill, not shoot to wound. The conditions [during a shooting] are always less than ideal. The easiest part of a person to hit is also the part that could cause fatal injury. The mind-set is to reduce the threat, not to kill. Unfortunately, death sometimes occurs but, generally speaking, most of those who die put themselves in that position, not the police.

The Los Angeles City Council on Tuesday rejected a proposed $4.5-million payout to a man shot by police as he fled a drive-by shooting. The payment would have settled a lawsuit Robert Contreras brought against the city over the 2005 shooting, which left him paralyzed. After a jury found that the officers had used excessive force in shooting Contreras and fearing that the city could be ordered to pay more than $10 million, lawyers for the city urged the council to accept the settlement deal.

The FBI announced Friday it will launch a civil rights inquiry into the fatal shooting of an unarmed college student by Pasadena police last month. FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said the inquiry is being launched independently of a call by Pasadena Police Chief Phillip Sanchez for the agency to look into the shooting of Kendrec McDade, 19. McDade was shot by two Pasadena police officers shortly after they took the report of an armed robbery near Orange Grove Boulevard. McDade was a suspect in the robbery, according to police, but was unarmed at the time he died.

How many police bullets actually hit Kendrec McDade, 19 years old and unarmed, on that dark Pasadena street? Do police have to yell "halt" or "stop" before pulling the trigger? Is it standard procedure to shoot from a patrol car? Must they shoot to kill? Why not use beanbags or rubber bullets? Where was the police camera? Though the crowd's manner was muted, the questions, passed forward on index cards, came unrelentingly to Pasadena Police Chief Phillip Sanchez as he stood in the sanctuary at New Revelation Missionary Baptist Church on Saturday morning.

The investigation into a controversial police killing of a college student last weekend took a dramatic twist Wednesday when Pasadena authorities arrested a 911 caller, alleging his fabrication led to the shooting. An officer shot 19-year-old Kendrec McDade on a narrow street in the city's Northwest district about 11 p.m. Saturday. Police were dispatched to the scene after a man, identified as Oscar Carrillo, called 911. He said two armed men had stolen his laptop computer and backpack as he was buying tacos at a stand on Orange Grove Boulevard.

Pasadena Police Chief Philip Sanchez asked a county law enforcement watchdog agency Tuesday to investigate the shooting of an unarmed man by two of his officers. Kendrec McDade, 20, was shot as the officers pursued two men suspected of ransacking a car and pointing a weapon at the car owner about 11 p.m. Saturday, authorities said. Sanchez said he asked Michael Gennaco, head of the Los Angeles County Office of Independent Review, to help conduct an investigation into the fatal shooting.

Last week, I added my name to a letter to Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. asking for a federal investigation into disturbing reports of assaults on inmates by L.A. County sheriff's deputies in jails. I have no idea what a neutral and objective investigation will reveal, but for the sake of the public, the Sheriff's Department and Sheriff Lee Baca himself, a thorough investigation is crucial. Managing a large network of custodial facilities like L.A. County's jail system is a gargantuan task, and it is complicated by the fact that many inmates have not only committed crimes but also have serious drug, alcohol and/or mental health issues.

Two and a half years after Oscar Grant III was shot to death by a Bay Area Rapid Transit police officer on an Oakland train station platform, the agency agreed Tuesday to pay the unarmed man's mother $1.3 million to settle her civil case against it and the officers involved. Wanda Johnson, Grant's mother, had sued BART and the officers for $50 million, charging wrongful death and violation of civil rights. Her son, 22, had been traveling home on New Year's Day 2009 after a celebration in San Francisco when a fight broke out in his rail car. The African American supermarket butcher was lying face down on the Fruitvale station platform when he was fatally shot by Officer Johannes Mehserle, 29. The white officer said he thought he had pulled out his Taser, not his .40-caliber pistol.

A federal jury Wednesday awarded $1.7 million to the parents of an autistic man killed by a Los Angeles police officer. Joseph Cruz, who was later fired from the LAPD for dishonesty in an unrelated case, killed Mohammad Usman Chaudhry early on a March morning in 2008. Cruz and his partner had encountered the 21-year-old man laying in the bushes alongside a Hollywood apartment building. Cruz has insisted that Chaudhry tried to attack him with a knife and that he fired his gun in self-defense.