July 10, 2003

You start with culture. Everyone I talked to who really knows said that's where it begins.

You start with a police culture that says if it's a legal shoot it must also be a good shoot, even when a disabled kid lies dead.

You start with a police culture that says lethal force is necessary to neutralize a threat, but doesn't quite concede that less-than-lethal force is the preferable option.

You start with a police culture in which a cop shoots and kills a black, hearing-impaired teen who's wielding a knife - and then allows, 18 months later, for the very same cop to be in position to shoot and kill a black, mentally disabled 15-year-old who's, yes, wielding a knife.

And once you've started there, you can think that it's coincidence, if a very creepy coincidence, in which a cop twice finds himself in pretty much the same wrong place.

Or you can think a little harder and ask yourself how it was that this cop, Jim Turney, got back to that same place.

One shooting you can possibly understand. Cops are human. Like the rest of us, they want to go home alive at the end of the day. No one disputes that the job is dangerous. In a cop's world, when there's a threat, it can mean that you never go home again.

But when there are two shootings so similar, what you understand, at minimum, is this: Whatever else happened, Turney seems to have learned little from the first incident.

The question for the Denver police is why. Is there something about Turney or is there something about the system? Or is it possible to separate one from the other?

I talked to Joe Sandoval, a professor of criminal justice and criminology at Metro State and once, long ago, a cop himself, who is a critic of the Denver police culture.

"The culture of the department is, 'You know, we're sorry the kid died, but he had a knife. The cop had no alternative but to neutralize the situation,' " Sandoval said.

"I understand the law. I understand when the DA says he doesn't have enough to go forward. But the culture of the department is that that's the standard for police behavior . . . instead of looking at a situation like this one and seeing how it can do better in the future - not in the context of killing people, but in assuring that everyone survives, cops as well as citizens."

For clues into Turney, I go to the videotaped police interview of the first time he shot and killed someone.

The death of Gregory L. Smith Jr. was declared a clean shoot, a legal shoot - just as the shooting Saturday of 15-year-old Paul Childs almost certainly will be.

The law is clear. The law says that if a cop reasonably feels threatened, he can use lethal force.

The law doesn't say that if there are cops nearby with Taser guns that you should wait for them. Or that if a cop with negotiating experience is on the scene you should wait for him.

The law doesn't examine how it was that the cop came to be in danger. It doesn't ask whether he made a tactical mistake when putting himself at risk or whether there was a reasonable, non-lethal way out.

What the law does say is that a cop sensing danger can fire. Turney did. And they'll bury Paul Childs on Saturday.

Some in the black community want a federal investigation. And, meanwhile, I read on the Denver Police Protective Association Web site's message board of one cop writing in about the "vultures" in the Denver media, saying, "Ofc. Turney, you did what you were trained to do, you did nothing wrong. The outcome was tragic, but you were not responsible for the incident."

As I watch the videotaped interview from the first shooting, I already know certain things about Turney.

I know he has been suspended from the force, apparently because his former mother-in-law accused him of threatening her over the phone, a day before the second shooting.

I know, too, that he finished at the low end of his police academy class and that he was rejected by three other police departments.

During this interrogation from January of 2002, Turney sits calmly. He has a shaved head and a tattoo that seems to cover most of his right arm.

He speaks with almost no affect as he describes the confrontation with Smith, who came slowly at him with a knife. Turney fired at the same time as Sgt. Robert Silvas, who has been involved in several shootings. It was four hours after the fact, and Turney could have been in shock, but he wasn't in such shock that he forgot to say the magic words to his interrogator: that he feared for his life.

There were no questions about state of mind. It wasn't that kind of interrogation. There were no questions about possible alternatives to lethal force either.

And someone in position to know told me he doubted Turney would have gotten much additional training or guidance after the shooting.

Soon, Turney was back on the streets. And 18 months later, he was back in the video room.

Mike Littwin's column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

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