Pennsylvania State Trooper Jay Splain has shot and killed four people in the line of duty since 2008 and is still on the job, according to The New York Times.
In 2008, Trooper Splain
was honored at a county law enforcement banquet as a hero, the police officer
of the year. The reason: He had shot and killed a suicidal man who allegedly
pointed an Uzi submachine gun at him.
That was the first killing. Trooper Splain went on
to fatally shoot three more people in separate incidents, an extraordinary
tally for an officer responsible for patrolling largely rural areas with low
rates of violent crime. All four who died were troubled, struggling with drugs,
mental illness or both. In two cases, including that of the man with the Uzi,
family members had called the police for help because their relatives had
threatened to kill themselves.
The most recent death was last month, when Trooper
Splain shot an unarmed man in his Volkswagen Beetle. After learning that the
officer had previously killed three other people over nearly 15 years, the
man’s sister, Autumn Krouse, asked, “Why would that person still be employed?”
Trooper Splain is an outlier. Most officers never fire their weapons. Until now, his full record of killings has not been disclosed; the Pennsylvania State Police even successfully fought a lawsuit seeking to identify him and provide other details in one shooting. In the agency’s more than a century of policing, no officer has ever been prosecuted for fatally shooting someone, according to a spokesman. That history aligns with a longstanding pattern across the country of little accountability for police officers’ use of deadly force.
Prosecutors and a grand jury concluded that Trooper
Splain’s first three lethal shootings were justified, and an inquiry into the
most recent one is ongoing. Rather than have independent outsiders look into
the killings, the police agency has conducted its own investigations — which
were led by officers from his unit — raising questions about the rigor of the
inquiries.
“When a police officer has shot at and potentially
killed a civilian, the public will never trust the police agency to investigate
itself and be unbiased,” said Tom Hogan, the former district attorney of
Chester County, Pa. A Republican, he helped write recommendations by the state
prosecutors’ association for independent investigations — a reform that many
departments resist, but one sought by the national prosecutors’ association and
major policing groups.
In its review of Trooper Splain’s killings, The New
York Times found inconsistencies between the evidence of what occurred and what
the state police said had happened. The officer appeared to have departed from
police protocols in several of the fatal confrontations, according to
interviews and an examination of investigative and court records.
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