Brian HoweyThe way Kenneth Gilbert Jr. and his father tell the story, it had been a busy morning running errands in east Atlanta when their pickup was suddenly cut off by a dark truck and forced onto the curb.
Once Gilbert Sr. got back on the road, he said, the truck swerved back into their lane. Gilbert Sr. said he hit the gas and sped around it, making a sweeping motion with his hand as he shouted at the driver to “move over.”
Gilbert Sr. said that as he slowed for the next stoplight, he saw the truck catching up — and a gun pointing at him from its passenger window. He yelled for his son to get down as a bullet shattered one of their rear windows and struck Gilbert Sr. in the head.
Gilbert Jr. then grabbed his gun, which he legally owned, from the floorboard of the pickup and returned fire. He, too, was shot in the head.
Both survived. And both insist they had no idea that the man shooting at them was an Atlanta police officer riding in an unmarked SWAT vehicle. The department would later say that Officer Scott Oliver, who was unharmed, opened fire only after seeing the younger Gilbert load and point a gun. The officer said he ordered Gilbert Jr. to drop it.
After an initial burst of media attention, the March 13, 2019, shootings quickly faded from the headlines.
Although The Washington Post has documented nearly 1,000 fatal police shootings nationwide every year, there is no comprehensive data on incidents in which officers shoot and wound someone.
That has made it difficult not only to know how often this happens, but also to hold departments and officers accountable.
“That kind of information is necessary to develop strategies to reduce officer-involved shootings,” said Chuck Wexler, who runs the nonprofit Police Executive Research Forum, adding that nonfatal police shootings deserve just as much scrutiny as fatal ones. “What matters is it was a shooting, whether they died or not. The real question is, what can we learn from that?”
To help fill this gap, The Post and Berkeley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program filed public records requests for information about nonfatal shootings from every department with five or more deadly police shootings from 2015 through 2020.
Analysis of data obtained from 156 departments found that in addition to the 2,137 people killed in fatal shootings, officers in those departments shot and wounded 1,609 more.
In other words, for every five people shot and killed by police in these departments, four others were shot and survived.
Read the full story here.
