The FBI’s License to Kill: Agents Have Been Deemed 'Justified' in Every Shooting Since 1993

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So, for example, the FBI report spends a full page describing what happened after they turned on the siren and the lights until they finally pulled over the car. They make it sound like it was a very extended chase. They talk about how the car rapidly accelerated, and the FBI agents had to pull up along side it and shout over and over and over again for them to pull over and finally brought it to rest, maybe 100 yards away — "approximately 100 yards away." That was a quote. And then, when you look at the alternative reports, though, first of all, a forensic crash reconstruction specialist said the car could of been going no more than 12 miles an hour. The police detective noted that it was in a merge lane so it would have had to accelerate a little bit. And an internal sketch created by the FBI but not included in this report, put the car stopped just 142 feet from the intersection, not 100 yards. So, less than half the distance. So, the FBI’s report created the sense of quite a chase that would have made it more reasonable to assume that the person in the car was a desperate and dangerous person.

Another example is the FBI’s report that was sent to this review group did not contain anything from the statement by the victim and it did not flag that that a crucial fact was in dispute. The crucial fact was, how did this guy move before the agent shot him? In the FBI’s report, it says that the agent who shot him said, "Show me your hands." Instead he moved. In fact he moved down and to his left, and so he thought was reaching for a gun or something and shot him to eliminate the threat to himself and to his fellow law enforcement officials. And that is what that guy said, the agent. But, the victim said, no, he had been moving to the right because another agent was simultaneously shot and open the door. He was listening to that agent. So, what is true is not knowable, but the fact that this was a disputed fact is relevant, and yet that was not put in the FBI’s narrative. It only came out because of the alternative investigations, which the review panel, which deemed this to be a good shoot, did not see.

AMY GOODMAN: Joseph Schultz said that he was responding to another officer telling him to open the door. Is that right?

CHARLIE SAVAGE: That is right. So, he’s saying the guy was saying, "open the door," so I was reaching to my right to open the door, as opposed to the agent who shot him who said he saw him reaching down and to the left. Again not knowable at this stage which of those two accounts is true, but, the relevant issue is, the FBI’s internal review panel that deemed this a good shoot did not have that information in front of them, in the narrative at least, that was prepared by the shooting incident review team.

Now, again, this is more than a decade ago. This is one incident. And it is not knowable, to me at least, at this stage whether this is in aberration or is this something that would happen more often, because the overwhelming majority of the time, there is no alternative investigation, there is no lawsuit that doesn’t get dismissed right away by a judge for a motion for summary judgment without reaching the stage of discovery and having this kind of evidence collected. And of course, most of the time, the people who are being shot are in fact criminal suspects, they are the people who — the drug dealer, whoever, who was going to go and be arrested. And so, so there is not a lot of public sympathy, I think, or interest in the judiciary in looking at those cases. The oddness of this one particular case were was a totally innocent victim overcame those hurdles, convinced the Anne Arundel Police Department that they wanted to do their own investigation, convinced the judge and the courts to let it get to discovery, and that is how we know that in this case something was odd .