When cops investigate cops: "Inherent conflict of interest"

Last night in St. Louis, an off-duty police officer shot and killed a teenager. There are conflicting accounts about whether the young man was armed. The officer, who was reportedly working as a private security guard at the time of the shooting, will likely be investigated by the very police department that employs him, a reality that rankles some.

"It's difficult to investigate your colleagues," says Brian Buchner, the president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. "There is an inherent conflict of interest. It's hard to put that wall up and be an objective, independent investigator."

In May, Wisconsin passed a law that requires an outside agency to investigate a death at the hands of a police officer or in police custody. Buchner says that the law also mandates that if the prosecutor declines to press charges in the case of a civilian dying at the hands of police, the investigation is released to the public.

"This goes a long way toward trying to heal the family and the community," Buchner told 48 Hours' Crimesider.

But so far, Wisconsin is an anomaly. According to Prof. David Klinger, a former Los Angeles police officer and the author of "Into the Kill Zone: A Cop's Eye View of Deadly Force," different police departments around the nation investigate police shootings in different ways.

Some, like the Chicago Police Department - a force well-versed in investigating shootings - handle the criminal investigation in-house, while smaller agencies that rarely see a homicide might rely on state police or a nearby sheriff's department.

Still others, like the LAPD, have a "shooting team" of officers whose entire job is to investigate police shootings. Klinger said that St. Louis police have recently put together a shooting team of their own, an approach that he generally supports. The St. Louis Police Department did not return a call seeking information on whether this new team would be investigating last night's shooting.

There is not accurate data on the number of civilians killed by police each year. The FBI collects reports of shootings from police departments, but only a small fraction of the more than 15,000 different law enforcement agencies in the country submit reports. Experts say that the vast majority of times police shoot a civilian the shooting is deemed justifiable.

In the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown by Ferguson, Mo., police officer Darren Wilson in August, some suggested that bringing in an outside entity, such as the FBI, to investigate police shootings might soothe some of the public's fear about conflict of interest. But Klinger rejects that idea, saying that said that no matter how far outside the department you get there is "no law enforcement entity that isn't suspect" in the eyes of some. And more practically, there wold likely be a lag in getting to the scene, photographing evidence, interviewing witnesses and canvassing the area around the shooting.

"Remember the outcry over how long Michael Brown's body was laying in the street?," Klinger points out. Now imagine if local cops had had to wait for a federal agency to arrive. Klinger also rejects the idea that civilians should be involved in investigating police shootings.

"The people in our society who know how to do homicide investigations are homicide investigators," he says. Still, he admits that it is difficult to avoid "the patina of conflict of interest" when police are, essentially, policing themselves.

One way Klinger says police agencies can build trust with the public is to post the results of shooting investigations online, which he says the LAPD and the Las Vegas Police Department have recently begun doing.

Klinger says that publishing the results of police shootings is not standard practice, although he believes it should be: "There is nothing to be lost by pushing that information out, and much to be gained."