8:28am | I didn’t know Douglas Zerby. I don’t know either of the Long Beach police officers involved in his shooting. And I wasn’t present when it happened.
Those three aspects of my disposition to the shooting puts me in the same basic position as most everyone in Long Beach: we don’t know much at this point. Scour the Long Beach Post and other news sources around town and we can hear part of the 911 call that brought officers to the scene; we can learn factoids such as that the officers shot Zerby eight times in total; we can hear some preliminary claims by police about why this went down the way it did.
But for many people a lack of knowledge about a subject is no deterrent to having strong opinions about it. And while that’s understandable for those with a direct tie to the incident—undoubtedly Zerby’s loved ones do not wish to believe Zerby’s actions justified his demise any more than loved ones of the officers in question wish to believe the two unjustly gunned him down—I’m puzzled when those standing on less slanted ground are already jumping off of it to conclusions.
It’s not that I don’t get where those on either side might be coming from. On one side, hey, being a police officer is one dangerous job; and when you get a call of a man with a gun, that’s in the realm of being as serious as it gets. This is not to say you’ve suddenly got carte blanche to blast away at whatever you find at the scene, but your number-one priority is to protect innocent schlubs like me from physical harm at the hands of others; and aside from the occasional guy who steals a tank and takes it for a joyride, a gun-wielding other is the greatest potential cause of harm.
To be sure, it’s preferable if you can get the guy to surrender, but you may very well be called upon to make a split-second decision regarding whether you need to implement deadly force to prevent the possibility of harm to the innocent (including yourself). With that in mind, you may not always have a chance to determine whether the gun-shaped object in the man’s hand that’s being pointed at you really is a gun—because that extra moment to make the determination may cost you, or some of the citizens you’re sworn to protect, our lives.
The other side consists of variations on feelings voiced by Zerby’s loved ones at Chief McDonald’s December 13 press conference: Why a shotgun? Why didn’t the officers didn’t engage in conversation before shooting? Why didn’t they use tazers? Was this tantamount to murder1?
I’m no apologist for the police, but I do believe it’s safe to say that most police officers pray they will never feel the need to discharge a firearm at anybody—because if they do, it will mean they were put in a position where they sincerely believed someone else’s life to be in mortal peril. The fact that two officers simultaneously discharged their firearms rapidly—one firing (according to the police) two shotgun blasts, the other six rounds from a handgun—seems to indicate that they perceived just such a threat. Because it’s either that, or these two officers who arrived at a “man with a gun” call chose needlessly to kill someone just because a convenient opportunity arose. And while not beyond the realm of possibility, it does strain credulity here.
There is, of course, a wrinkle on the first option: the officers may have sincerely felt that lives were endangered, but they did not handle the situation competently. We cannot adjudge this to be the state of affairs simply because it turned out Zerby did not possess a gun, but that fact, along with other details, does raise questions.
Fortunately, we live in a society where every officer-involved shooting is automatically investigated. The questioning is built into the process even in cases where the person shot by the officers actually had a weapon, never mind when it turns out he did not.
“It takes time to confirm some of the information in these investigations,” said Chief McDonald, rightly, at the press conference. But time may never help us get answers to some questions. Presuming Zerby did indeed point that water nozzle at the officers—a gesture that even most children understand may very likely draw fire in self-defense—we can never really know why.
We also will never know what we would have done in the officers’ position, either before or in that moment, because we weren’t there, and because most of us never have and never will be police officers responding to a call about a man sitting on a porch fooling with a “six-shooter.” Maybe we would have managed to retire never having shot a perhaps disturbed but unarmed man. Or maybe our hesitancy to fire would have surfaced on an occasion when the gun the man was purported to be holding and pointed at us actually was a gun, and we would never have lived to see our retirement.
All we know right now is that a man believed to be brandishing a handgun was shot, and that it turned out the man was not actually in possession of a weapon. But there are so many reasons right now not to think we know exactly what happened, or what could have or should have happened, that it’s amazing any of us believes otherwise.
Footnotes
1“Assassination” is a term that was thrown out there from the gallery at the press conference.