July 10, 2003

All the training in the world for handling the mentally impaired will not help a cop in a crisis if he doesn't know he's dealing with such a person. So it's too early to say whether additional training could have averted last weekend's tragic shooting of 15-year-old Paul Childs.

Throwing caution aside, however, everyone from newspaper columnists to members of the Greater Metro Denver Ministerial Alliance has been arguing that Childs' death demonstrates the need for better police training. Well, we'd like to see more training too. Every street cop should know how to handle people with mental disabilities. But it's simply not clear whether such training would have made a speck of difference in this particular case.

Police can't always be expected to make a quick judgment regarding someone's mental state - especially when responding to a call involving an attempted stabbing. Absent information to the contrary, police must assume that a criminal suspect is mentally competent and aware of what's going on.

When we first commented on the Childs shooting two days ago, we advised a wait-and-see attitude given the available facts. Today we find ourselves still unwilling to join the strident critics who describe the shooting as an indefensible mistake or even the result of cavalier or racist attitudes. Once the testimony of every officer and witness on the scene has been assessed and compared, and all the forensic and other evidence assembled and analyzed, the shooting may indeed turn out to have been an indefensible mistake or worse. But we simply don't know yet, and the evidence available at this point by no means entirely supports the highly charged opinions.

Is it really asking too much that voices be lowered for the time being and inflammatory charges be shelved? No, we don't expect restraint from a hopeless demagogue like Alvertis Simmons, but we were disappointed to see the Rev. James D. Peters Jr. claim that Officer James Turney "would be more at home in the white sheets of the Ku Klux Klan." We share the minister's concern that Turney has shot two African-American teenagers in the past 18 months, but life is usually experienced in shades of gray, and it turns out that Turney himself is a minority employee who checked "Asian or Pacific Islanders" on his police application form. We're not sure how many Asian-Americans have belonged to the Klan, but it's safe to say they don't fit the normal membership profile.

If Turney is a trigger-happy cop, he must be banned forever from patrol, as the ministers demand, and perhaps drummed out of the force as well. But we doubt that Chief Gerry Whitman needs any kick in that direction; it's been Whitman, after all, who in recent years has pushed for software to aid the department in detecting disturbing patterns of behavior by individual officers - discharging of weapons, complaints of brutality from the public, etc. - so that problems don't escalate into tragedy. Meanwhile, Denver has become a national leader in adopting non-lethal weapons such as Tasers as an alternative to guns.

None of this means that excessive force by Denver police will never be a problem, or isn't a problem now. But it does suggest we should refrain from embracing the most damning conclusion in the Childs case before the investigation is complete.

Copyright 2003, Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.