The author is a retired Detroit Police investigator and a one-time defendant in a police-Involved shooting that resulted in a death. He was subsequently acquitted in a trial in Detroit Recorder’s Court.
As a retired Detroit Police Investigator with over four decades of experience investigating violent crime, and as someone who once stood trial for second-degree murder after acting to save my partner’s life and my own, I understand, in the most personal and painful way, the emotional, legal, and moral weight of a split-second decision made under duress.
In 1993, during a gang enforcement operation in Southwest Detroit, I believed my partner had just been shot. I returned fire in what I perceived to be an ambush, an incident sparked when a third party inserted himself into our investigation.
Prosecutors charged my partner and I with murder. The headlines were deafening. Public judgment swift. But once the jury heard the full story, understood the peril we faced, and saw the situation in context, they acquitted us…