NEW YORK -- In many popular police movies, the heroes shoot their weapons repeatedly and kill one bad guy after another, making for sensational action footage.
Those fantasies, coupled with the last year's real-life killing of an unarmed man by four New York City police officers, reinforce the stereotype that all officers are trigger-happy.But according to police officials, crime experts and studies by The Associated Press of law enforcement methods, the majority of police officers nationwide never fire their weapons during their careers.
"Well over 95 percent never shoot their weapons here," said New York City Police Commissioner Howard Safir.
With 41,000 officers on the nation's largest police force, there were 155 incidents last year when New York police fired their weapons. Forty-two "offenders" -- people pursued for questioning or arrest -- were shot by police in 1999, according to department firearms discharge statistics. Officers also shot three bystanders; none fatally.
In Utah, there were a record 15 fatal police-involved shootings in 1999.
Police killings steadily declined from 41 in 1990 to 11 in 1999. Amadou Diallo's killing last year received the most attention and protest.
Diallo, an immigrant from West Africa, was standing in the doorway of his apartment building when four white officers in plainclothes approached him for questioning, officially putting him in the "offender" category. They shot at him 41 times; 19 bullets struck him.
The officers are now on trial for murder in Albany, N.Y. They testified they thought they saw Diallo with a gun.
Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist who studied police shootings in Miami over a 10-year period, said most officers do their best not to get into a situation where deadly force is required. "That's true in L.A., true in Chicago, true in Miami, true in New York," said Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina.
Indeed, such large departments as those in Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia report low incidences of police shootings. But in 1998, The Washington Post published a series revealing that the District of Columbia police shot and killed more people per resident in the 1990s than any other large U.S. police department.
The series, which won a 1999 Pulitzer Prize for public service, prompted action by city and federal officials. Police Chief Charles Ramsey asked the Justice Department to probe a decade of police shootings to try to restore public confidence, and announced a sweeping retraining program for the entire force.
Hubert Williams, president of the Police Foundation, a nonprofit research group, said retraining may be needed in other cities to prevent some shootings that result from the cultural gap between black suspects and white officers.
"We need to engage in a broader set of parameters that involves the culture of inner-city youth," said Williams, who once headed the Newark, N.J., police department. "We need to draw from savvy street officers, who day after day engage these young kids and never shoot anybody."
Despite the low number of police shootings in New York, there's the perception that officers constantly fire their weapons. Safir blames the media.
"I think people are surprised that most officers never fire their weapons because they've seen so much press based on one or two incidents," he said in a recent interview. "The truth is, the media conditions people. ... People hear 41 shots and they think it's not an aberration, when it's quite an aberration."
Geraldine Majors, 52, an elementary school teacher who lives near the Bronx street where Diallo was killed, said movies and TV shows reinforce the stereotype of the officer with the quick-trigger finger.
"The cops are always shooting at someone in the movies or TV," Majors said. "Take that picture and add it to the perception enforced in young minority kids from the poor neighborhoods that cops are bad: The Diallo shooting was nothing new to us."
The AP interviewed 10 New York officers of all ranks, with career spans of seven to nearly 20 years. Because of the Diallo trial, the officers only agreed to speak on condition of anonymity.
But they all said they had never fired their weapon, despite being in situations where they removed the weapons from their holsters.
"That's the worst feeling in the world, having to pull your gun, because there's a chance you may have to use it," said a female detective with nearly 18 years of experience.