Straight Shooter

Here's an very interesting piece from this week's Boston Globe Sunday Magazine, centering around Boston Police Officer (and firearms instructor), Billy Kennedy, and the policies of the BPD concerning the use of lethal force. It's a bit lengthy, but it covers a lot of information, and is well worth the time to read it. I'll post just the opening paragraph here to tease you in.

Straight Shooter

To this day, Billy Kennedy doesn't quite know why he's alive and Roy Sergei isn't. When Ted Jeffrey Otsuki, a career bank robber, came running out of an alley and pointed a gun at him one night in 1987, Kennedy's instinct was to press himself against the wall of the Back Bay storefront where he and Sergei, a pair of Boston cops, had given chase. The shots whizzed past in an instant 13 in all. "I felt the bullets go by my face," Kennedy recalls. "I fired a round at Otsuki. Then two people came up. He got behind them. I pulled my finger off the trigger. He went around the corner, and I couldn't see him."

My one criticism would be of some of the statistical comparisons therein, but aside from that, I found it well-written and extremely non-biased, given its source.

And it's not every day you open the Boston Globe and see this.