How do we identify killer cops?: Spence The answer lies in better testing of police candidates.

Gerry Spence | USA TODAY

Movie director Quentin Tarantino and actor Viggo Mortensen claimed recently that too many cops are simply uncharged murderers. A recent Huffington Post article by University of California-Berkeley sociology professor Jerome Karabel was headlined, "Police killings surpass the worst years of lynching, capital punishment, and a movement responds."

I’m a trial lawyer. During a career of more than 60 years in the courtrooms of America defending the poor, the forgotten, the lost and the damned, I’ve shut out a haunting question: Are we safe from our own police?

This past year, the news media have drawn our focus to far-ranging, rampant police brutality. Just last week, we learned new details about the killing on Oct. 20, 2014, of Laquan McDonald, 17, a black youth who ended crumpled and dead on the streets of Chicago. His body was riddled with 16 bullets fired in about 15 seconds — 13 of those seconds, prosecutors say, while he lay prone and dying on the pavement. All the shots were fired by a single white cop while at least five other officers stood by.

Not until the video of the killing was ordered released last week by a judge were murder charges finally filed against the officer. Charges against a Chicago cop for a killing? In Chicago, the police are frequently involved in shootings, including 15 from July to September this year, but rarely have any officers been charged.

The McDonald case fits a disturbing pattern. In New York, Eric Garner, 43, died when a cop applied a deadly chokehold on him. Walter Scott, 50, stopped for a broken taillight, was slaughtered in North Charleston, S.C., with multiple police shots in his back as he ran. It is likely that Baltimore officers intentionally gave Freddie Gray, 25, a potentially death-inflicting ride handcuffed and locked in the back of a police van. All of the victims were poor, black and, in actual fact, powerless. The quantum of justice available to most Americans is in direct proportion to the individual’s social and economic status, which is to announce the controlling principal in America: Little money, little status — little justice.

How do we save ourselves from the brutality and murders of our own employees — the police? Instinctively, we take comfort in our sacred rights as Americans. But when we face an arresting police officer, we could discover that our rights are on the order of a ripped out page from yesterday’s newspaper blowing down the street.

Please hear me clearly:

We need law enforcement. We want to be safe. We fear chaos and crime, and we’re willing to overlook occasional officer misconduct as the price we must pay for a predictable and safe society in which to pursue our lives. Moreover, at the outset I would be doing the police a gross disservice to argue that all officers are villainous crooks wearing a badge, and that the word “cop” and “killer” are synonymous. Such is not my belief. But what am I saying?

In America, we are free to select our life’s work, and the choices we make tell their own story. What is the difference in the persona of a school teacher, a mechanic, a nurse, a truck driver or an Internet technician on the one hand and the personality structure of the cop on the other? Ask the teacher why she chose her life’s work and she’ll tell you, “I love children and want to help them succeed.” Ask the cop the same question and his answer will be equally benign: “I want to keep people safe.” He’ll never say, “I’m looking for the opportunity to shoot a harmless, unarmed running black man in the back." The teacher is motivated by love while the cop, going in, embraces the ever present prospect of physical violence against another human being. That invites a different variety of the human species.

When we permit persons to self-select police work as their life's work, we have also invited some who might yearn to dominate, to mutilate and even to kill others. That truth has long been recognized. What has happened in the lives of our officer candidates that causes them to seek power over others, especially over the powerless? Life-forming experiences usually come at an early age, and as adults we find ourselves still acting them out. The most conscientious law enforcement organizations now submit their candidates to rigorous testing in an attempt to identify the smiling, well presented individual who, at his or her core, is a latent killer. But any candid police department would surely have to admit that its testing provides little more than proof that it at least tried to identify and eliminate the most violent, sadistic candidates.

The news is of little comfort. The Supreme Court in Mullenix v. Luna tells of a Texas trooper, Chadrin Mullenix, who had been ordered by his superiors not to shoot at a fleeing automobile. He violated that order and shot six bullets into the car, killing the driver. The Texas Department of Public Safety found that Mullenix had acted recklessly, lacking “sufficient legal or factual justification to use deadly force.” The heirs of the dead man sued. On Nov. 9, the justices held that the cop’s actions did not violate “clearly established (constitutional) law” and granted him immunity from the suit. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the lone dissenter, wrote: “By sanctioning a ‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing, the court renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow.”

POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media

So far science, too, has failed us. The answer here rests in a more successful testing of our police candidates. Science can and will one day develop accurate methods by which killer-cop candidates can be identified and rejected before they are welcomed into the society of law enforcement to thereafter satisfy impulses that lead to the needless dead.

Where does all this leave us? It leaves us where we have been from the beginning — with killer cops on the loose. It leaves us knowing that too many of our youth who seek to become cops are responding to personality forces that are dangerous to all of us. It leaves us knowing that when we face a cop, he could be the one who encompasses an urge to kill and that we may, indeed, be killed. It proves what Tarantino, Mortensen and Karabel are saying and what we have known all along: Too many cops are simply uncharged murderers.

Gerry Spence is a trial attorney and the author of Police State: How America’s Cops Get Away with Murder.

In addition to its own editorials, USA TODAY publishes diverse opinions from outside writers, including our Board of Contributors. To read more columns like this, go to the Opinion front page.