Experts say officer in Ma’Khia Bryant shooting acted appropriately

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In this April 20, 2021, image from body camera video played during a news conference held by the Columbus Police Department, 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant, foreground, wields a knife during an altercation before being shot by an officer in Columbus, Ohio. The footage was released hours after the shooting. (Columbus Police Department/WSYX-TV via AP) Criminal justice experts maintain that the officer who shot Ma’Khia Bryant was justified in his use-of-force and followed the correct training protocol in order to “neutralize the threat.” Experts weighed in on the shooting of 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant by Columbus police officer Nicholas Reardon after viewing body-cam footage of the event. In the video, Bryant, who is wielding a knife, can be seen pushing a female who falls backwards at Reardon’s feet. She then turns to attack another nearby female, raising her knife while the woman is pinned against a car in the driveway. Reardon fired his weapon four times, and Bryant died soon after. Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green State University professor who has compiled statistics on fatal shootings leading to criminal charges against officers, told The Columbus Dispatch, “My first impression is that the officer was legally justified in using deadly force,” he said.  “It’s a terribly tragic situation, and my heart goes out to the girl and her family and friends. But from looking at the video, it appears to me that a reasonable police officer would have had a reasonable apprehension of an imminent threat of serious bodily injury or death being imposed against an officer or someone else. That’s the legal standard.” James Scanlon, a former SWAT officer with the Columbus Police Department and 33-year veteran on the force agreed with Stinson’s assessment. “An officer is justified in using deadly force if his life or the life of someone else is at risk,” Scanlon said. “Few would argue that there weren’t at least two lives there that were at serious risk.” Scanlon said that Reardon wasn’t trying to protect himself, “but to save the life of someone he doesn’t even know. … It’s a shame that no one has recognized that that officer, in all likelihood, saved one or more lives.” According to The Dispatch, the legal standard for an officer’s use-of-force was established in a 1989 Supreme Court case Graham vs. Connor. The ruling established that officers may use deadly force if they reasonably assume that a person poses an imminent threat to officers or others, and allows that officers must often make “split-second judgments” in stressful and rapidly evolving situations. Stinson said the shooting is “a good reminder that officers sometimes have to make split-second, life-or-death decisions in violent street encounters. These situations can escalate in a matter of milliseconds, as we saw here.” Responding to questions about why the officer didn’t attempt to de-escalate the situation first, or use a stun-gun instead, Stinson said, “I don’t know what the officer could have done differently. Based on what I saw, there was no opportunity for the officer to de-escalate.” However, the incident generated a lot of opinions and controversy on social media, with many observers questioning the officer’s response and wondering why a Taser was not used. Interim Columbus Police Chief Michael Woods said in a press conference that officers must use deadly force when faced with someone with a weapon who is using deadly force themselves, meaning a Taser was not appropriate. “If there’s not deadly force being perpetrated on someone else at that time, an officer may have the opportunity to have cover, distance and time to use a Taser,” Woods said. “But if those things aren’t present, and there is an active assault going on in which someone could lose their life, the officer can use their firearm to protect that third person.” Scanlon dismissed the suggestion that Reardon could have used a Taser. He said using a Taser is “not an appropriate response to a lethal-force situation…officers are trained to shoot until the threat is neutralized,” he said. As for why the officer didn’t attempt to shoot Bryant in the leg first, Woods said that officers are trained to shoot at the person’s “center-mass,” the largest part of a person’s body when stopping a potentially deadly threat. “When you try to start shooting legs, or arms, rounds miss and then they continue on and there are people behind that, that could be in danger that are not committing anything,” Woods said. “So we try and minimize any danger to anyone else if we have to use our firearm.” Scanlon added that the body-camera footage “is a textbook scenario that an officer would see in a film during a ‘shoot/don’t shoot’ training exercise. That’s exactly the kind of film you’d see in training rooms where you have to react to a deadly situation.” According to the AP, an Ohio public safety board implemented use-of-force standards six years ago that limited officers from using deadly force to situations when they or others are threatened with serious injury or death. The standard was updated in December 2020 to prohibit chokeholds and neck restraints unless in a life-threatening situation. The post Experts say officer in Ma’Khia Bryant shooting acted appropriately appeared first on American Police Beat Magazine.