Ed. Note: Greg Prickett is former police officer and supervisor who went to law school, hung out a shingle, and now practices criminal defense and family law in Fort Worth, Texas. While he was a police officer, he was a police firearms instructor, and routinely taught armed tactics to other officers.

Back in the days of Fault Lines, in June of 2016, I wrote an article on the shooting death of Corey Jones. In the post, I predicted that former Palm Beach Gardens police officer Nouman Raja would be acquitted in the shooting. I’m happy to report that I was wrong. On March 7, 2019, a Florida jury convicted Raja of both manslaughter and attempted first-degree murder in the death of Jones.

Raja is the first Florida police officer to be convicted in an officer-involved shooting in the last 30 years.

The key evidence appeared to be the recording of the phone call from Jones to a tow-truck company, which showed that Raja was not being truthful lying about the shooting.

Prosecutors believe that Jones thought he was being robbed, and drew his gun as he tried to get away by running down an embankment. Jones was shot in the heart, and testimony showed that he would have dropped almost immediately. Jones’s unfired gun was found 125 feet away from his body.

There’s not a whole lot else I can say in this, other than to quote on of the family member of Jones:

“the sweetest sound was the click of those handcuffs [on Raja]…”

Raja will return for sentencing on April 26th. He faces a minimum of 25 years, and could face life in prison.

This was the correct result, and it was reached because of non-police evidence. By the same token, the Palm Beach Gardens police department and the local State Attorney,  deserve credit too. The police department fired Raja within days of learning that his evidence was incorrect a lie. The local grand jury found the shooting was not justified. The State Attorney filed charges against him and pursued the case. And the trial jury convicted him.

And it should have convicted him. Scott Greenfield, my old “mean-ass editor,” summed it up in his post at the time.

We can reasonably surmise that Raja’s shooting Jones was motivated by the First Rule of Policing, since we have no basis to believe that Raja had any nefarious motivation. And we accept the premise that the First Rule has some merit, some level of acceptability, because we accept the premise that police officers face risks that others don’t, and are therefore entitled to be the first to fire in the fact of a perceived threat.  Even the law imbues cops with magical powers to see indicia of threats that other eyes can’t see, which means they get to shoot and kill well before anyone else would think there is any threat.

This is where the message is never sent, that the First Rule is not a license to kill.  That a cop’s life isn’t any more valuable, any more worth saving or protecting, than anyone else’s.  A cop’s life is no less valuable, but no more. And yet we, as well as police and prosecutors, struggle to make sense of a cop killing someone needlessly, because we tacitly accept the premise of the First Rule just as much as cops do. We accept the fact that they get to shoot before a threat, real or imagined, because they are entitled to walk away, no matter what. Because they are cops.

We need to change the understanding of the police on the First Rule—not only should the police expect to go home, but citizens should have a right to expect that they will get to go home too. Police need to understand that citizens have the same right to live that officers do, and that when they deprive a citizen of that right, they will face the consequences.

This verdict is a good first step.