Contumacious
Radical Freedom
The FBI's Nearly Unbelievable Record of "Justified" Shootings
We're still waiting for the FBI to finish its internal investigation into exactly what happened in an Orlando apartment last month, when an FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a Chechan man who knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, during an official interview. Since the shooting, unnamed officials have painted a number of different pictures of the scene in the room. Among them, that Todashev was unarmed, brandishing a knife, and carrying a pipe or broomstick.
One thing that does appear almost certain based on recent history, however: When the FBI releases its final report on the incident, it will find that the shooting was justified. The New York Times with the details:
[F]rom 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 "subjects" and wounded about 80 others and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings. ...
Out of 289 deliberate shootings covered by the documents, many of which left no one wounded, five were deemed to be "bad shoots," in agents parlance encounters that did not comply with the bureaus policy, which allows deadly force if agents fear that their lives or those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical punishment involved adding letters of censure to agents files. But in none of the five cases did a bullet hit anyone.
Those numbersmore than 150 shootings that wounded or killed a subject, all justified; 284 deliberate shootings in all, 279 justifiedobviously raise some red flags about the fairness and validity of those internal reviews. As the Times explains, in most of those cases the FBI internal investigation was the only inquiry into the shooting, as it will be in the Orlando incident"
.
We're still waiting for the FBI to finish its internal investigation into exactly what happened in an Orlando apartment last month, when an FBI agent shot and killed Ibragim Todashev, a Chechan man who knew Tamerlan Tsarnaev, during an official interview. Since the shooting, unnamed officials have painted a number of different pictures of the scene in the room. Among them, that Todashev was unarmed, brandishing a knife, and carrying a pipe or broomstick.
One thing that does appear almost certain based on recent history, however: When the FBI releases its final report on the incident, it will find that the shooting was justified. The New York Times with the details:
[F]rom 1993 to early 2011, F.B.I. agents fatally shot about 70 "subjects" and wounded about 80 others and every one of those episodes was deemed justified, according to interviews and internal F.B.I. records obtained by The New York Times through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. The last two years have followed the same pattern: an F.B.I. spokesman said that since 2011, there had been no findings of improper intentional shootings. ...
Out of 289 deliberate shootings covered by the documents, many of which left no one wounded, five were deemed to be "bad shoots," in agents parlance encounters that did not comply with the bureaus policy, which allows deadly force if agents fear that their lives or those of fellow agents are in danger. A typical punishment involved adding letters of censure to agents files. But in none of the five cases did a bullet hit anyone.
Those numbersmore than 150 shootings that wounded or killed a subject, all justified; 284 deliberate shootings in all, 279 justifiedobviously raise some red flags about the fairness and validity of those internal reviews. As the Times explains, in most of those cases the FBI internal investigation was the only inquiry into the shooting, as it will be in the Orlando incident"
.
