By The Editors

Although few in number, they are stunning incidents –“rare events that reverberate widely.”

They are the shooting deaths of police officers, killed by mistake by a fellow police officer or officers.

And, predominantly, the officers shot to death in these tragic circumstances are black or Latino.

That’s one of the major points of a first-of-its-kind report released last month by a special task force that New York Governor David A. Paterson appointed last year to study the extent of such fatal, mistaken “police-on-police” shootings and to suggest how to prevent them. The 67-page report, “Reducing Inherent Danger,” concludes with nine recommendations that stem from the task force’s conclusion that “many of these deaths are preventable. The dangers that give rise to these deaths are inherent in policing, but those dangers can be reduced and more deaths can be prevented.”

Although the commission’s inquiry focused on fatal, mistaken-identity shootings, it said its “nationwide, systematic investigation” determined that these are “merely the tip of the iceberg of confrontations between on-duty police officers (usually in uniform) and their off-duty, plainclothes or undercover counterparts.”

While the overwhelming majority of such confrontations end without violence, the report states, “each contains the seeds of a tragedy.”

Further, the commission report emphasizes that, while police officials must continue their efforts to eliminate overt racial bias from departmental ranks, they also must “go beyond the issue of overt bias to deal with the unconscious bias that influence all people, including police officers.”

The reason, it says, lies in the “evidence that both police officers and members of the general public display unconscious biases that lead them to be quicker to ‘shoot’ images of armed black people than of armed white people in computer-based simulations testing shoot/don’t shoot decision-making.”

Gov. Paterson appointed the commission after a black New York City police officer, who was off-duty and in civilian clothes, was fatally shot in Harlem in May 2009 by other officers when he tried to prevent his own car from being stolen. The officer, Omar Edwards, was 25 and had been on the force for two years.

Edwards’s death followed by little more than a year the fatal, police-on-police shooting in nearby suburban Mount Vernon, New York of Christopher Ridley, 23. Ridley, an officer on the Mount Vernon police force who was within a month of completing his probationary term, was also killed when he was off-duty and in civilian clothes. He had been trying to arrest a homeless man who had just committed a brutal assault on another man.

Like ten of the fourteen officers killed in mistaken-identity, police-on-police shootings in the last fifteen years, officers Ridley and Edwards were people of color.

And they were off-duty – a circumstance in which black and Latino police officers are far more likely than white officers to be mistakenly shot by other officers.

Those racial facts of mistaken-identity, police-on-police shootings underscore the ripple effect that intensifies the distrust many black and Latino civilians express toward police in general. They’ve fed the perception, the report states, “that race matters in these confrontations. Just as many people of color are aware that they are more likely than their white counterparts to be stopped and questioned by police, so, too, many officers of color believe that they are more likely than their white counterparts to be mistaken for a criminal when out of uniform, and that the danger is many times greater when they are taking police action with their gun displayed.”

The nine-member Paterson commission was chaired by Christopher E. Stone, former president of the nonprofit Vera Institute for Justice and a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Its vice chair was Zachary W. Carter, an attorney in private practice who is a former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. It’s executive director was Damon Hewitt, on leave from his position as an Assistant Counsel and head of the Katrina Project for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educations Fund, Inc.

In considering a total of twenty-six incidents of mistaken-identity, police-on-police fatal shootings that have occurred since 1981, the report is careful to distinguish between those involving undercover and plainclothes officers and those involving off-duty officers. It makes clear that undercover and plainclothes officers — white, black and Latino – have been mistakenly shot by other officers “without any obvious racial or ethnic pattern.”

But it goes on to note that “the reality is strikingly different for off-duty officers.” Of the ten off-duty police officers killed since 1982, only one was white – the one killed that year. That startling fact lay behind the report’s most haunting words:

“ A special fear haunts police officers of color cross the United States. Beyond all the dangers that every law enforcement officer faces, these officers feel uniquely threatened by another. It is the danger that a day will come when they are out of uniform – off-duty, undercover, or in plainclothes—and the color of their skin and a gun in their hand will prompt fellow officers to mistake them for an armed criminal, and shoot. When an officer of color is not in uniform and sees a crime in progress or a life threatened, and considers taking police action, he or she must often think twice about how the next police officer as on the scene will react to an unfamiliar black or Latino with a gun.”

The commission says the distinction between the two kinds of mistaken-identity shootings is important because “police departments, at least until now, have had more tools and training to keep plainclothes and undercover officers safe than they typically have had for off-duty officers.”

The Report emphasized that its recommendations are intended to “reinforce the confidence and resolve” of police officers of color “by strengthening the ability and commitment of law enforcement agencies everywhere to protect and respect all of their members as well as the communities from which they are drawn.”

The recommendations include:

1. To reduce the frequency and danger in police-on-police confrontations, we recommend that common protocols be developed both statewide and nationwide regarding when and how to take police action while off-duty or out of uniform, and how challenging and confronted officers should conduct themselves.
2. To make those protocols effective and to prepare departments to respond appropriately when tragedy strikes, we recommend that interactive, scenario-based training on the protocols become mandatory in New York State and routine throughout the nation, both for new recruits and for veteran officers, and that training be developed for police leaders in how to respond effectively to police-on-police shootings.
3. To reduce the role that racial stereotypes play in police confrontations, we recommend that both federal and state governments accelerate the development of testing and training to measurably reduce unconscious racial bias in shoot/don’t shoot decisions.
4. To reduce the role that racial stereotypes play within police departments, we recommend that police training on issues of race and diversity be expanded to include a focus on diversity within police agencies, drawing on the experiences of officers of color who have been mistaken for offenders.
5. To improve the quality and credibility of police responses in the rare instances of police-on-police shootings in New York State, we recommend the development of a specialized support team that would be quickly deployed to any location in the state where a police-on-police shooting occurs, and that could be available to assist departments in other states upon request.
6. To improve understanding as to how police-on-police confrontations occur, and how they can be resolved without injury, we recommend the establishment of a mandatory statewide reporting system for all firearms discharges, the distribution of a voluntary annual survey to individual officers, and enhanced record-keeping measures by the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
7. To improve the transparency and understanding of prosecutorial decisions in police-on-police shootings, we recommend that prosecutors overseeing these investigations publicly disclose as many details as possible as early as possible, and that Governors give great weight to the need to encourage public disclosure of the circumstances of these shootings when weighing whether or not to appoint a special prosecutor in an individual case.
8. To share the benefits of the lessons drawn from police-on-police shootings, we recommend that the protocols developed to protect officers be adapted for use by those community organizations providing training to civilians on how to handle themselves during encounters with police, and that this training be made available to civilians of all races and ethnicities.
9. To attend to the concerns of the growing numbers of officers of color in our increasingly diverse society, we recommend that the federal government, together with local law enforcement agencies, launch a program of dialogue and research on the experiences of officers of color, especially when off duty, deepening the field’s ability to support these officers as they strive to bring safety and justice to communities that need them so dearly.