Soon the women turned onto the street where the LAPD official lived. As Margie Carranza slowed to 5 miles per hour to toss a newspaper onto a driveway she noticed a police car outside a house up the street, but didn’t see any cops.

Moments later, when the women were roughly 130 feet away from the detail guarding the house, police officers somehow mistook their blue truck, occupied by two Hispanic females, for the gray truck that Dorner, a 6-foot-tall, 270-pound African American was driving. They fired more than 100 rounds into the vehicle. The older woman was hit twice in the back; both miraculously survived. The highest-ranking officer on the scene––the man whose house was under protection––said, “I mean, the truck, in the dark, you know, if you look at the truck from the one side in the dark, it looks gray.” Other officers talked about how the sound of a newspaper hitting the pavement can resemble a gunshot.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck told The Los Angeles Times, “As an officer, you look for cues. You know how someone drives normally and then you see someone coming at you slowly, driving in the middle of the street, stopping and starting. That can be misinterpreted.” But the incident wasn’t actually caused by hitherto unappreciated similarities in routine newspaper delivery and a killer on a spree. The cops started firing because knowing that a cop killer was out there, somewhere, was unusually scary and their fright got the best of them. Perhaps unconsciously, they put others at greater risk to better protect themselves.

As if to underscore just how on edge and frightened police were that morning, David Perdue, a white, 160-pound surfer driving a black pickup truck, was also mistaken for Christopher Dorner and shot by a different police officer.

In the days that followed, I heard a lot of harsh words used to criticize the offending cops: idiotic, clueless, incompetent, knuckle-headed, reckless. But I cannot recall anyone calling those cops cowardly or questioning their courage (myself included), even though they shot up vehicles that were simply driving down the street before they could even identify even so much as the race or gender of their drivers.

Nor can I recall any other instance of multiple, prominent right-leaning commentators calling a police officer cowardly in the aftermath of any dubious police shooting. Someone surely made that criticism, everything having been said on the internet, but courage simply isn’t a part of mainstream discourse on police killings and shootings of unarmed people, even though the explicit defense invoked by police officers in almost all such cases is literally, “I feared for my life.”

Isn’t that the very same feeling the deputy in Florida is thought to have experienced?

If so, what explains the dearth of commentary on courage after other police shootings? If an officer is expected to rush toward the sound of gunfire without backup to confront a premeditated killer, and is widely condemned for failing to take that huge risk, why wasn’t a failure of courage widely attributed to the police officer who killed Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was playing with a pellet gun in a park? Even if that police officer feared for his life, briefly holding fire while assessing that situation arguably required far less courage than confronting a mass shooter.