There is a familiar order of events every time someone in Maine dies in a police-involved shooting.

The officer is put on paid leave while the case is investigated by the state Attorney General’s Office, which issues a detailed report in a matter of weeks. For many years now, the findings have always been that the use of force was justified.

That’s good news. Maine has not had an instance of the gross misuse of police power that would be a major threat to public safety. But the attorney general’s investigation does not answer all the questions the public has a right to ask.

That’s because the scope of the report is very narrow. The prosecutors are asked to determine if a police officer committed a crime by using deadly force. The standard is whether the officer had a reasonable belief that he or a third person was in imminent danger.

They don’t ask whether there was anything that could have been done differently to avoid the shooting in the first place, or if different tactics, equipment or expertise might have made a difference. Those are questions that many police departments have asked internally, and in some instances, they have made their results public.

Under a new state law, the public will see more of that process, and that is a positive step.

York County Sheriff Maurice Ouellette will be assembling a team, which will include a member of the public, to review that actions taken in Lyman last weekend that resulted in the death of Andrew Landry. Police say Landry menaced them with a pair of kitchen knives even after he was shocked with a Taser dart.

Similar reviews are under way, looking into the fatal shooting by a game warden in Togus last year and a non-fatal shooting in Clinton, where an officer shot at a woman’s tires when she wouldn’t stop.

The point of these reviews is not to hound police officers, or to put doubts in the back of their minds when they are making split-second decisions while lives hang in the balance. But assuring that officers have the right tools, tactics and training is a matter of public safety, and believing that police are well-prepared for their difficult job, is a matter of public confidence.

These reviews should be done as regularly as the attorney general’s probes, and their results should be widely shared among departments, so that the best practices are implemented everywhere, That will make officers safer as well as the public.

 

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