LAPD shooting outside Olympic station adds to ‘striking’ cluster of police shootings since last week

The Los Angeles Police Department is reviewing an unusual cluster of six separate police shootings since last week, the latest of which occurred just outside the department’s Olympic police station Tuesday afternoon. During a Police Commission meeting held before the Olympic shooting Tuesday, LAPD Chief Michel Moore called last week’s cluster of five shootings “striking” but said the incidents were not related and that each shooting would be investigated and assessed individually, including for any potential wrongdoing or policy violations by officers. “The effort was to have him surrender and come outside,” Moore said Tuesday, with police playing recorded messages from the man’s family members asking him to surrender. After entering the home, the officers saw a 33-year-old man holding two knives in a hallway, trying to break through the closed door of a bedroom where a victim was located, Moore said. Commissioner Dale Bonner asked Moore whether the department could provide the commission with an interim report on the trajectory of police shootings so far this year, and Moore said he would make sure that an assessment of 2021 incidents to date is provided alongside with the formal report on shootings and other police uses of force that is still due to the commission for the 2020 calendar year.