Pubdate: Sat, 06 Aug 2005
Source: Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale, FL)
Copyright: 2005 Sun-Sentinel Company
Contact:  http://www.sun-sentinel.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/159
Author: Ivette M. Yee, Mike Clary, Staff Writers

MAN KILLED IN DRUG INVESTIGATION

Officers Confront Victim Outside Motel In West PB

WEST PALM BEACH -- A law enforcement officer working a drug 
investigation with Palm Beach County sheriff's deputies shot and 
killed a man early Friday during a confrontation outside a motel near 
Interstate 95 and 45th Street.

The man is the seventh person to be shot and killed by a law officer 
in Palm Beach County in a little more than nine months.

"[An officer] felt threatened by the suspect and shot his weapon," 
PBSO spokeswoman Teri Barbera said.

The shooting took place during a joint narcotics operation involving 
the Drug Enforcement Administration, PBSO deputies and U.S. 
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, DEA official Jeannette Moran 
said. The man was transported to St. Mary's Medical Center and died 
at 2:19 a.m., Barbera said.

Neither the victim nor the officer who shot him was identified.

A second police-involved shooting early Friday took place in Broward 
County. A Sunrise man was shot and killed at his home by a SWAT team 
in search of drugs.

The seven fatal police shootings in Palm Beach County since October 
involve several police agencies, and took place in various settings 
and circumstances.

One of those who died was a 16-year-old Delray Beach boy who was 
driving erratically on a school campus after a dance. Another 
fatality was a 37-year-old utility company energy trader whose death 
was ruled "suicide by cop" after he aimed a handgun at police and 
four officers responded with a fusillade.

In a metropolitan area the size of Palm Beach County, seven fatal 
police shootings in nine months doesn't add up to an epidemic of 
deadly use of force, according to some law enforcement experts. "But 
it is a legitimate issue for police executives to be looking at," 
said Josh Ederheimer, director of the Center on Force and 
Accountability for the Police Executive Research Forum.

His group, a nonprofit based in Washington D.C., was commissioned to 
study the Delray Beach Police Department's use of force policy after 
the fatal February shooting of Jerrod Miller, 16. The report is due 
by the end of the year.

David Klinger, a former police officer who is now a professor at the 
University of Missouri-St. Louis, said seven fatal police shootings 
is an area of some 1 million residents "does not shock me. That's 
within the norm of what we know from various studies over the past 20 
or 30 years."

At the same time, Klinger and Ederheimer agreed that fatalities at 
the hands of law officers had been trending down in recent years, due 
in part to stiffer departmental rules on use of deadly force.

"There is more of an ethos now that says restraint is the way to go," 
Klinger said.

For officers confronted with a situation they perceive as threatening 
to their lives or the lives of others, however, restraint is often 
hard to summon.

Palm Beach County State Attorney Barry Krischer alluded to that in a 
July 8 memorandum in which he found that police officers "were 
legally justified" when on March 10 they fired at least 26 rounds at 
John Garczynski, who was threatening suicide in a car outside his 
sister-in-law's Boca Raton apartment.

However, wrote Krischer, since police knew of Garcyznski's mental 
state and "given the dynamics of 'suicide-by-cop,' responding in 
force turned control of the situation over to the deceased.

In Friday's police shooting at the Days Inn in West Palm Beach, a 
police investigation will be followed by a review by the state 
attorney, according to office spokesman Michael Edmondson. Details of 
the incident, which is being probed by the Sheriff's Office, were 
sparse on Friday.

"Any use of force involving death gets reviewed by the office," 
Edmondson said. "It'll be handled the same way it's handled in any 
use of force situation. If it's clearly a justifiable use of force, 
the case is closed. If it's clearly unjustifiable force, then charges 
would be filed. If it falls into a gray area, it goes before a grand jury."

Staff Researcher Barbara Hijek and Staff Writer John W. Cote 
contributed to this report.
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