The Washington Post editorializes on the punishment handed down to Deval Bullock, the cop who shot and killed Sal Culos:

AIRFAX COUNTY police officer Deval V. Bullock is a good cop who made one disastrous mistake: Bumped by his own car door, he accidentally fired his weapon and killed an unarmed, nonviolent, non-threatening suspect during a routine arrest in January. The shooting of Salvatore J. Culosi, an optometrist under investigation for being a sports bookmaker, was unintentional. But it was also negligent; under the circumstances, Mr. Bullock should not have had his finger on the trigger, nor even aimed his weapon at Mr. Culosi. Now the Fairfax police department is recommending a slap on the wrist for Mr. Bullock — three weeks without pay and his removal from the police SWAT team. The punishment is lenient, to say the least, but even so it is too much for the police union.

For months before this egregious shooting, an undercover police detective had been placing bets with Mr. Culosi, who had no criminal record; had never owned a firearm; and presented no threat of violence, flight or resisting arrest. It is still unclear, 10 months after the fact, why despite that profile police decided to arrest Mr. Culosi with a SWAT team, which is trained and equipped for use in dangerous situations. After Mr. Culosi’s death, the police department said it would conduct a review of policies and procedures involving the use of such teams. But if there was such a review, its results have not been made public. One wonders if the SWAT team in Fairfax, lacking frequent opportunities to respond to situations involving imminent danger and threats, is deployed simply to give its officers something to do. If so, that’s bad policy and bad policing.

The latter is the most important part of this case. I didn’t think Bullock would get fired, much less face criminal charges (he made a mistake that cost a man his life — in any other line of work, that’s a t least worthy of termination).

That’s unfortunate, but there’s a larger picture, here. Will Fairfax County implement real reform in the way it uses its SWAT team? Have any reforms at all yet been implemented? Has there been any serious introspection and reexamination of policies and procedures? More importantly — and sadly, if the answer is what I think it is — will the citizens of Fairfax stand up and demand these reforms? At a minimum, Horan ought to be fired, not just for this, but for his refusal to hold any police officer accountable for any crime for four decades. And the chief of police ought to be fired for the way he and his subordinates have treated the Culosi family.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 3:48 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Police Militarization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.