Police killing of Mario Woods — unnecessary, not uncommon
The killing of 26-year-old Mario Woods by five San Francisco police officers Dec. 2 was typical of many other such shootings in both its circumstances and likely legal outcome. The target of the shooting had displayed a weapon (a knife) and refused to drop it. At least five police officers fired at Woods at least 15 times. The police chief almost immediately announced that the killing was justified. This is also the likely outcome from the district attorney under California law. But the killing of Woods also was totally unnecessary to protect San Francisco police from a life-threatening attack or to allow them to disarm this suspect.
The fact that many cops are taught to do exactly what the San Francisco police officers did to Mario Woods means that the number of unnecessary deaths in the United States is measured in the hundreds every year. Sanctioning unnecessary killings by police is common. As many as 400 of the more than 1,000 killings by police each year are not in response to lifethreatening assaults. Hundreds more killings involve “shoot to kill” shootings that result in multiple wounds to the victim and are not required to protect officer safety or law enforcement efficiency.
At issue in any fair assessment of the Woods shooting is the degree to which this suspect’s knife posed a threat to the lives of police. Here the statistics I and my research team analyzed for a forthcoming book are clear — and surprising. Knives are very dangerous when used in attacks against ordinary citizens (they cause more than 13 percent of all homicides) but not when they become instruments of attack against uniformed police officers. We analyzed every killing of police by assault over six years (2008-13) in the United States: There was a total of two knife deaths (that is, less than 1 percent of total police deaths.)
There was never any attack with a knife that killed an officer unless he was alone with his attacker, and there was never a fatal attack when the officer and the attacker were any distance apart. Based on these statistics, the death risk to the officers in the Woods encounter was zero.
A 2014 article by an expert in Police Magazine called the assumptions of knife-assault danger “speculative dogma that often goes unchallenged and becomes accepted as fact.” But police kill as many as 150 people a year because they display knives.
The reason uniformed police are at such minimum risk from every attack weapon (knives, clubs, bats) except guns is tactical training and bulletproof vests. On-duty death rates for uniformed police have dropped by 75 percent over the 39 years since 1976, when Kevlar vests were widely adopted by law enforcement. This huge decline in officer deaths has not produced any equivalent benefits for civilians, where less reliable statistics suggest, at best, a 9 percent decline.
So the first reason why Woods didn’t need to die was that five officers could have arrested and disarmed him without firing a single shot. There are a lot of kitchen knives in England and Wales (population 56 million), yet the police have shot to death only one citizen from 2012 through 2014. If it is unnecessary to kill in Manchester or Liverpool, then why is it necessary to shoot in the Bayview?
The second reason why Woods didn’t need to die: Five police officers fired “at least 15 shots” at him in a very brief time. There is only one reason this many shots are fired — the police are shooting to kill. Why not pause after the suspect is wounded to reassess the situation?
In police shootings, it turns out, each additional wound increases the chances of death rather substantially. In seven years of Chicago police shooting incidents, the death rate when one wound was inflicted was 21 percent; two wounds, 34 percent; three or four wounds, 56 percent; more than four wounds, 74 percent of all cases. The San Francisco police increased the chances of Woods dying fourfold by continuing to shoot him. Why, Chief Greg Suhr, were the second through 15th shots necessary?
A terrible but factually accurate answer to that question is that shooting to kill is accepted police practice — it’s what these police were trained to do. But this overkill response to knife, club and baseball bat attacks has not a shred of statistical support in the study of half-a-million assaults and killings over a decade’s time in the Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted reports published by the FBI. The awful truth is that police are taught that fostering the survival of the people they shoot has no value.
Until recently, San Francisco’s was a less deadly police department than many other big city forces. In the four years between 2009 and the end of 2012, the city reported a total of two police killings, the lowest rate of the 14 biggest cities in the nation. Those days are gone. The officers who opened fire and kept shooting should not be the focus for blame. This is approved police practice in the United States. And that is why unnecessary killings by police are an American epidemic.