Even so, The Guardian unearthed many alarming facts about local law enforcement in a place where all 54 fatal shootings over the last decade appear to have been ruled justified by police organizations that essentially oversee themselves. Some findings are jaw-dropping, and they suggest a little remarked upon failure.

Let’s start with some of what Guardian journalists Jon Swaine, Oliver Laughland, and Mae Ryan found.

After police killed the unarmed De La Rosa, a couple who witnessed the shooting as bystanders said that he had his hands up and was not reaching for his waistband. Later, while his corpse was under a sheet on a hospital gurney, a police officer lifted the sheet, began playing with his toes, and made a joke about rigor mortis.

The police officer then said, “I love playing with dead bodies.”

A different Bakersfield police officer, Rick Wimbish, “has been involved in at least four fatal shootings in two years, including that of De La Rosa, during which Wimbish deployed his taser. None of the four men killed in these confrontations were armed with a deadly firearm themselves. One, a violent criminal, had a BB gun; another was holding a tire iron.” Shooting the guy with the BB gun struck me as clearly justified after I read the description of the incident. But during one of his other killings, Wimbish and other officers opened fire on an unarmed confidential informant of their own department during a planned operation after the guy he was with––the criminal he was helping cops to catch that very moment––pulled out a gun.

And the “tire-iron” case involving Wimbish could hardly be more suspicious:

Jason Alderman’s family refuse to believe it, but police say he was trying to rob a closed Subway restaurant one Saturday evening in August. He was confronted abruptly by Bakersfield officers Wimbish and Garrett ... The pair was responding to an unrelated call-out when they spotted Alderman, according to police records. Garrett, who was the passenger in the patrol car, is said to have got out and shot Alderman dead, firing “several rounds.” After days of vague and confusing statements the department eventually said Alderman, 29, had been carrying a black tire-iron and held it towards Garrett as if it were a gun. A photograph of the iron, helpfully laid out in the approximate shape of a rifle, was released. But unfortunately, police said, only one person apart from Alderman had seen what happened: Garrett himself. No surveillance footage existed; the sandwich restaurant’s cameras had stopped filming earlier in the night. “To our knowledge there is no video,” a police spokesman said at the time, “has never been video, and we certainly don’t have any video in evidence.” Five days after the shooting, however, investigators working for Alderman’s family made a discovery. There was, in fact, some surveillance footage of the incident. The police had quietly seized it from the Subway manager, who had been asked not to disclose what it showed. Police refuse to release the recording. Sergeant Joe Grubbs, then the Bakersfield PD spokesman, said the shooting would be “highly scrutinised” and said: “We want to be scrutinised.” But within a month, Garrett and Wimbish had been cleared of wrongdoing by the department itself...

Remarkably, another Bakersfield police officer, Timothy Berchtold, “shot and killed three people in the span of less than two months in 2010,” The Guardian added. “Two of those he shot were unarmed and accused of a strikingly similar offence—reversing a car they were driving towards Berchtold. One of them, Traveon Avila, was a 15-year-old boy.”