Commentary –

Cops Shouldn’t Portray

Scott Smith As A Martyr

By Chris Powell

Maybe the case against New Milford police Officer Scott Smith wasn’t proven beyond a reasonable doubt  for everyone who paid attention to it. That witnesses said Franklyn Reid seemed to have been subdued by Smith just before the officer shot him fatally in the back doesn’t disprove Smith’s claim that, a moment after being subdued, Reid made a sudden threatening movement, thus putting the officer in fear for his life and prompting him to shoot. Only Smith knows what really happened.

But the Litchfield Superior Court jury’s convicting Smith on a manslaughter charge Monday is at least plausible, and such an outcome always seemed possible, even as the murder charge brought by Waterbury State’s Attorney John Connelly always suggested more premeditation than seemed inherent in the circumstances, the foot chase of a career criminal.

Indeed, there was some evidence at trial that the New Milford police themselves first considered the shooting accidental. Guns drawn in fear and anger will be fired accidentally sometimes, and the New Milford police pistol is an unusual one with a hair trigger. Smith’s shooting Reid accidentally and then making up a story of a sudden movement would be as plausible as anything else here, and Smith could have rationalized it in his anger that Reid had led him into a mistake that, even if admitted honestly, would end any officer’s career. (It may be too horrible for most people to contemplate, as the state’s attorney did, the possibility that a cop could shoot a criminal merely out of opportunity and malice.)

If he did shoot Reid accidentally, Smith gambled that by risking a manslaughter or murder charge he could beat a charge of negligent homicide and keep his career, gambled that a prosecutor and a jury would always give a cop the benefit of the doubt. Maybe they would still – they should – but first there has to be a doubt, and the claim of a sudden movement by a criminal who was not known to be armed was not enough to create a doubt with Smith’s jury.

What does the verdict mean for the police?

Since they are under attack by race-mongering demagogues and apologists for criminals in other shooting cases, Connecticut’s police may feel the verdict keenly as a blow to their integrity and their position generally. But police should beware of making Smith a martyr, beware of an attitude that they are always right and always must be believed quite apart from the other evidence and that they never abuse their power. For such an attitude would be only the reflection of the attitude of the demagogues and apologists for the criminals, who have minimized the threats that provoked the two other most controversial police shootings in Connecticut – the shootings of Aquan Salmon in Hartford and Malik Jones in New Haven – and who have exploited racial resentments, since Salmon, Jones, and Reid were black while the officers who shot them are white.

Yes, it was more than cheeky for Reid’s parents to declare vindication on the steps of the courthouse. Reid made much trouble in his short life – the people who knew him best testified to his violence last week – and he put himself in the position in which he was killed; he has to share culpability with Smith. But it is always a triumph for democracy when power can be held to account, and, right or wrong – Connecticut must hope desperately that it is right – Smith’s conviction may build credibility for the state’s criminal justice system, especially among those most distrustful of it, people of color.

State’s Attorney Connelly, who works with cops every day, was called a traitor for prosecuting one here. The support shown for Smith by other cops from around the state as they gathered at the courthouse sometimes degenerated into intimidation. Right or wrong in this case, Connelly refused to be intimidated or even complain. Having convicted most of the murderers on Connecticut’s death row, including a cop killer, Connelly now has won what appears to be Connecticut’s first conviction of a cop for a wrongful shooting on duty. Such fearlessness, integrity, and skill may do something for the criminal-justice system among people of  all backgrounds and persuasions.

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester.)