When we permit persons to self-select police work as their life’s work, we have also invited some who might yearn to dominate, to mutilate and even to kill others. That truth has long been recognized. What has happened in the lives of our officer candidates that causes them to seek power over others, especially over the powerless? Life-forming experiences usually come at an early age, and as adults we find ourselves still acting them out. The most conscientious law enforcement organizations now submit their candidates to rigorous testing in an attempt to identify the smiling, well presented individual who, at his or her core, is a latent killer. But any candid police department would surely have to admit that its testing provides little more than proof that it at least tried to identify and eliminate the most violent, sadistic candidates.

The news is of little comfort. The Supreme Court in Mullenix v. Luna tells of a Texas trooper, Chadrin Mullenix, who had been ordered by his superiors not to shoot at a fleeing automobile. He violated that order and shot six bullets into the car, killing the driver. The Texas Department of Public Safety found that Mullenix had acted recklessly, lacking “sufficient legal or factual justification to use deadly force.” The heirs of the dead man sued. On Nov. 9, the justices held that the cop’s actions did not violate “clearly established (constitutional) law” and granted him immunity from the suit. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the lone dissenter, wrote: “By sanctioning a ‘shoot first, think later’ approach to policing, the court renders the protections of the Fourth Amendment hollow.”

So far science, too, has failed us. The answer here rests in a more successful testing of our police candidates. Science can and will one day develop accurate methods by which killer-cop candidates can be identified and rejected before they are welcomed into the society of law enforcement to thereafter satisfy impulses that lead to the needless dead.