A Look Back
Badge Blasts
From the Charleston Gazette
Monday, December 8, 2014
Editorial:
   The lethal, erosive effect of police shootings
Much of America is agonizing over the high ratio of young black men who are shot to death by white police — in Ferguson, Missouri, and elsewhere. As serious as that problem is, police killings aren’t limited to blacks, and some others also raise disturbing questions.
   Last week, The Washington Post asked why Fairfax County police never explained why they shot an unarmed man to death in his doorway last year and left his body unattended for an hour. People in that Northern Virginia suburb still don’t know why it happened.
West Virginia has a similar case, as follows:
   Last year, a heavily armed State Police SWAT team and federal drug agents went at daybreak to the Clay County mobile home of a disabled man suspected of trading pain pills for stolen goods.
His family said a fusillade of bullets apparently was fired through his front door before he opened it and the door evidently was pried open afterward. The body of Richard Dale Kohler, 65, was so riddled by wounds that he had a closed-casket funeral.
  The police report says officers were forced to break open the door, and Kohler raised a rifle at them, so they fired in self-defense. But relatives say the man hobbled on a cane, which might have been mistaken for a weapon.
   “How could he be holding a cane in one hand and raising a rifle with the other?” his daughter told a Gazette reporter. “Dad wasn’t that strong, he was disabled.”
In the past, she said, her father had welcomed officers into his trailer. He never was known to possess a gun, she said.
   Later, troopers went to a Clay County magistrate and obtained a search warrant that was backdated before the shooting occurred.
   Clay County prosecutor Jim Samples said this week that the state-level warrant was for stolen property — a different topic not covered by the federal-level drug warrant that launched the raid.
Samples said his investigation of the affair remains “open.” He has asked the family, represented by Charleston lawyer Mike Clifford, to provide any evidence contradicting the official State Police report.
   Last year, we asked: “Why was a high-powered SWAT team — usually assigned to deadly shootouts or hostage crises — sent on a trivial mission to search the home of an ailing man suspected of pill-trading? That seems like overkill. Why was the raid conducted at daybreak, while the man was asleep?”
   Police work is dangerous. In gun-polluted America, officers never know when a suspect will open fire without warning. That’s why police wear bulletproof vests during confrontations. It’s understandable that they may be fearful.
   But police are not sent into communities to kill people who are suspected of wrongdoing. Every time police kill someone before that person has a chance to work his way through the proper system of justice, where everyone sorts out fact from fiction in the clear light of day, the more citizens lose confidence in the legitimate authority of police, courts and juries. The very civilization is eroded.
- See more at: http://www.wvgazette.com/article/20141208/ARTICLE/141209330/1103#sthash.MfdRDKx0.dpuf