Scottsdale (AZ) officer - has shot six during 12 yr career

[n5wd]

If you're a LEO or family or friends to one, you often will hear, with a point of pride sometimes, that "I've never had to shoot someone in my career", or words to a similar effect. Hearing the story of this Scottsdale police officer, who has had to shoot someone on average every two years of his 12-year career.... I'm not sure whether he's just unlucky, cursed, lucky, or a bit aggressive with his use-of-force, or what.

So, would you want to partner up with him in a two-man car?

http://www.chron.com/news/article/Police-officer-in-Ariz-shooting-has-shot-6-others-3331708.php

[MoJo]

No, I wouldn't want to partner with an officer who is so quick on the trigger. I would like to see what an independent (FBI, State Police etc.) investigation of his actions shows.

[The Annoyed Man]

Before frying this guy on the Interweb Burner, I'd like to lift a few things from the article:

Peters is a 12-year veteran of the police force who has served on its SWAT team. In three of his previous six shootings, other officers also fired at suspects.

A list compiled by The Arizona Republic shows Peters' first shooting was in 2002, when he was one of three SWAT officers who shot and wounded a domestic violence suspect after a standoff. Between 2003 and 2010, he was involved in five fatal shootings.

The Maricopa County Attorney's Office investigated his previous shootings and ruled them justifiable, Rodbell said. In one instance, he received the department's medal of valor for killing a suspect who was holding a store employee hostage after hijacking a doughnut truck driver.

Not everyone agrees that Peters always acts appropriately.

Jason Leonard, a lawyer in Fort Myers, Fla., who represented the family of a man killed in 2006 by Peters and another officer, said he is concerned the city seems to support Peters even when his actions are questionable.

"My concern is that he seems to shoot first and ask questions later and has been supported in this policy," Leonard said. "I don't think he's going after innocent citizens, however, if you find yourself in a precarious situation, he seems to err on the side of escalating the violence."

The out of state lawyer quoted here is trying to make money on behalf of the family of one of the guys this officer shot and killed. This lawyer accuses the officer of escalating the violence. Has it occurred to anyone here that maybe the bad guy (remember, he's a bad guy) is the one who escalated the violence and left the officer no choice but to shoot?

This officer served a lot of that time on a SWAT team. By definition, it would seem that SWAT officers are more likely to be involved in a shooting than the average beat cop, simply because their presence on the scene means that it has already escalated to a level of at least potential if not actual violence requiring their intervention. Add to that the fact that the average SWAT officer is likey a better trained shooter than the average beat cop, and it is not surprising that A) they would shoot more people than a beat cop, and B) that more of those shot would be killed.

I hate overbearing government as much as the next guy, and I very much want police officers to be better at deescalation and mediation than they are at killing. But I also want them to be VERY good at killing when that is the only option, so that they may go home to their families and live to serve another day. I wouldn't be too quick yet to condemn this guy. In the end, it might turn out that he is indeed a rogue officer. But until all the facts are in, I would urge all of us to wait to fry his taters until after we have those facts.

Be it known that Arizona cops don't pick around none. I also note that this officer serves in Maricopa County (Scottsdale PD). Isn't Maricopa County the heart of Joe Arpaio territory? If you're a bad man, don't go down there. The percentages aren't in it.

[Rex B]

This officer served a lot of that time on a SWAT team. By definition, it would seem that SWAT officers are more likely to be involved in a shooting than the average beat cop, simply because their presence on the scene means that it has already escalated to a level of at least potential if not actual violence requiring their intervention.

TAM, I'll go along with all but this. Might be different in Scottsdale, but these days every 5-man suburban PD has a SWAT team. Plenty of instances where they have used the SWAT guys for situations such as apprehending a non-violent warrant violator. Maybe they need the practice, but it often results in unwarranted force, and sometimes doesn't end well.

[Sport Coach]

Well said Annoyed Man!

[puma guy]

I will let this one play out. A friend of mine on HPD had a partner back in the 60's and 70's that was involved in a lot of shootings and was constantly castigated by certain radical newspapers in Houston. Many were hijackings in progress or chasing the perps. He was even nicknamed by his peers and some of the rags discovered it and started identifying him by that name. I won't mention it here to protect the innocent as they used to say on "Dragnet". They were also shot at a lot.

[A-R]

Well said Annoyed Man!

[SRH78]

Actually, this is his 7th shooting, 6 of which were fatal. That is according to the link provided anyway.

[Carry-a-Kimber]

I can see the headlines. "Cop Kills Doughnut Theif and Receives Medal of Valor"
Sometime the truth is funnier than fiction.

[The Annoyed Man]

This officer served a lot of that time on a SWAT team. By definition, it would seem that SWAT officers are more likely to be involved in a shooting than the average beat cop, simply because their presence on the scene means that it has already escalated to a level of at least potential if not actual violence requiring their intervention.

TAM, I'll go along with all but this. Might be different in Scottsdale, but these days every 5-man suburban PD has a SWAT team. Plenty of instances where they have used the SWAT guys for situations such as apprehending a non-violent warrant violator. Maybe they need the practice, but it often results in unwarranted force, and sometimes doesn't end well.

I actually thought about this aspect when I wrote the above paragraph. I'll let it stand for the following reaons....

If you stop and think about it, sending a SWAT team to serve an arrest warrant on a non-violent offender is the exactly opposite of how it used to be done. It used to be that a patrol car with a couple of officers would be dispatched to the home, and that was sufficient. Why the change? It's because people don't tend to "come along quietly" anywhere near as often as they used to. In 1966 or '67, the father of a friend of mine was shot and killed in Tehachapi California while serving a warrant at a local residence for kiting bad checks or some such. He was the Tehachapi Chief of Police at the time. He knocked on the door, and the BG answered it with a .45 and put my friend's dad down with a double tap in the chest before he could even step back. I had a good friend who was a retired LA Co deputy sherrif who was partnered with the brother of an old girlfriend of mine back when he was still working. They were serving a warrant on a guy for selling marijuana. They knocked, the guy answered with a raised pistol and shot my girlfriend's brother in the chest. He was wearing a vest, and although the bullets did't penetrate the vest, they hit him so hard that he wanted to die. My buddy Amos was able to scramble back out of the way, drop, get ahold of his partner's arm, and drag him out of the line of fire, and make a frantic call for backup.

Those were two "non-violent" offenders who reacted to a knock at the door from police by shooting the officers before they could even say what they were there for. Now, it may be an inefficient use of manpower and taxpayer dollars to employ SWAT in the role of serving warrants on pot-smokers and check-kiters, but you have to balance that agaisnt the value of an officer's life, because it is a FACT that people react violenty to the idea of being arrested, even when they have had no prior history of violence. My friend was 15 when his dad was killed. The cost wasn't just to the officer's life. It was to his fatherless son and his husbandless wife and his childless parents. It SWAT is what it takes to bring people like that in without losing an officer, then I'm for it.

While I agree that the potential for roughness can increase with SWAT, far more often though the suspect, when confronted by overwhelming force and numbers, surrenders meekly and allows himself to be led away. I don't want to see cops administering field "justice," but neither am I too upset when a scumbag gets a couple of knots in his scalp because he couldn't just quietly surrender.

[RoyGBiv]

TAM...
Do you type really fast or are you using some speech-to-text software?
Reading your posts is almost always worthwhile, but they frequently make my fingers tingle.
And... I think you should change your handle to "The Articulate Man"

[The Annoyed Man]

TAM...
Do you type really fast or are you using some speech-to-text software?
Reading your posts is almost always worthwhile, but they frequently make my fingers tingle.
And... I think you should change your handle to "The Articulate Man"

Nope, no software....just typing. But I write a lot, and I'm fairly good at organizing what I want to say on the fly, so a lot of what I type is almost just "stream of consciousness" stuff.

Besides, you know what they say.....If you can't dazzle 'em with your intellect, baffle 'em with your bul.......er, uh, use of lots of long words and carefully crafted sentences. Yeah....that's it.

[srothstein]

One of the most interesting facts in law enforcement is that the average officer will go his whole career without shooting at any suspects, but that the officers who are involved in shootings are almost all involved in multiple shootings over their career.

So far, there have been a few theories advanced on this. One theory is that the cop who is involved in a shooting is too quick on the trigger and thus gets involved in more. A second theory is that the cop who is involved in a shooting is usually working in an area where there is more crime and more violence, thus being put into more shooting situations than other cops.

A third theory, and it is fairly interesting to me, is that once a person has killed someone else, there are two possible effects. Either he becomes much less willing to get involved in violence and much harder to provoke or he loses some of the inhibition towards killing and becomes more willing to shoot. So far, no one has been able to tell which way anyone will go or explain the direction. My pet modification of this is that the average cop will become more willing to shoot to protect someone else but less willing to shoot to protect himself. I do think that a cop who is already violent will become more violent bu I think that is a small minority overall.

[n5wd]

I saw this mentioned in another forum, but it does ring true. If this was EMS, we'd call the officer a "crap magnet", meaning that somehow, someway, many of the bad things in the world seem to be attracted to him, personally. That's why I asked the question, regardless of whether all of the shoots were perfectly good and not merely "good shoots" as cleared by the department, would you want to partner with him in a two-man car. I'm not sure I would - just because it seems like he's more likely (for whatever reason) to get involved in a shooting incident. i hope, and believe, it's still the case that the majority of folks don't become poh-leece because they'll get to shoot people.

[RPB]

I'd choose him over a different guy who needs a partner (his 7th) because... he missed the BG target 6 times ...