Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, September 28, 1995 TAG: 9509280033
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
That's good. The probe may provide additional details about the circumstances of the shooting. Perhaps all questions will never be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, but more rather than less information is the way to provide as much satisfaction as possible.
Similarly welcome will be the conclusion of a state-police investigation said to be near its end. While Police Chief Bill Brown has been too chary with information - refusing, for example, even to officially identify all the officers involved - his decision to turn the matter over to the state police was a wise one.
Still, unless the findings of the FBI or state police depart dramatically from the story as it is now understood, the person to blame for Taylor's death is the man who died.
The three officers encountered Taylor in a Blacksburg drugstore, where they were trying to serve papers on him for failing to appear in court on charges of parole violation. He had run from the police on previous occasions. When he pulled a BB-pistol that looked like a .50-caliber handgun and turned it toward the officers, they shot him.
Failing to appear in court is not, of course, a capital offense. Nor is the crime, robbery, for which Taylor had been jailed and then released on parole - though robbery is no petty misdemeanor, either.
Of course questions need to be asked, among them: Why try to move on Taylor inside a store with other people around? And: Can we be sure a white man would have suffered the same fate?
There is, however, another, more fundamental question: When you pull out a BB-pistol designed to look like a highly lethal weapon and point it at police officers trying to serve you with papers, what do you expect to happen?
Many in the New River Valley, not just friends and family of Taylor, are upset about the shooting. It is certainly a troubling event. The police probably should have acted differently.
But the Blacksburg police are not the Los Angeles Police Department. And this situation is not like the killing a few years ago in Botetourt County, in which a sheriff's deputy shot a fleeing black man in the back, and state police were not immediately called in to investigate.
In situations like the one the Blacksburg officers faced, police must both defend themselves and try to defuse the perceived threat to others. Taylor's actions, assuming the facts of the case are as outlined, were more than just stupid; they amounted to criminal endangerment of the police, bystanders and himself.
Taylor is dead, the police are not, and speaking ill of the dead is not pleasant. But it is an injustice to the living to assume that death alters the issue of responsibility.
Will more details be worth getting? Sure. Do police procedures and actions require constant and external scrutiny? Of course. Was Taylor's death preventable? Most definitely. But according to such details as are available now, the one person clearly able to prevent Taylor's death was Taylor himself.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***