The Los Angeles Police Commission voted Tuesday to require officers to try, whenever possible, to defuse tense encounters before firing their guns — a policy shift that marks a significant milestone in the board's attempts to curb shootings by police, reports the Los Angeles Times.
The new rules formally incorporate a decades-old concept called "de-escalation" into the Los Angeles Police Department's policy outlining how and when officers can use deadly force. As a result, officers can now be judged specifically on whether they did all they could to reduce tensions before resorting to their firearms.
Tuesday's vote caps a 13-month effort by the Police Commission to revise the policy. Two sentences will be added to the department's manual, the first of which tells officers they must try to de-escalate a situation — "whenever it is safe and reasonable to do so" — by taking more time to let it unfold, moving away from the person and trying to talk to him or her, and calling in other resources.
At Tuesday’s meeting, the commission’s inspector general said because commissioners can consider whether an officer’s actions before a shooting contributed to that shooting, the revisions do allow the panel to consider an officer’s de-escalation efforts — or lack of them — when deciding if a shooting was justified or not.
