A former cop who killed shares lessons on deadly force

Randolph had a butcher knife aimed at the throat of Klinger's police partner, Dennis Azevedo, who was on the ground trying with all his might to hold back Randolph's attack.

Just this month, a Los Angeles police officer was found "unjustified" in shooting and killing a 25-year-old mentally ill man.

[...] more and more people are calling for strategies to make such incidents less common, notably through improved police training.

For Klinger, it has long been a very personal issue — one that led a young cop who entered the "kill zone," as officers call it, to become a researcher seeking to understand the dynamics of confrontation.

When Klinger showed up in his ranks on the night shift, Tim Anderson, then an LAPD sergeant, wasn't sure he was the kind of recruit who'd make it in neighborhoods plagued with gang warfare.

Klinger, a quiet, devout Christian, whose dad was a classical clarinet player, had moved to California from Miami, at age 13, with his mom and two sisters after his parents split up.

"In the blink of an eye," Azevedo recalls how Randolph lunged forward and stabbed him in the lower chest with a blow stopped — just barely — by his protective vest.

Stunned, Azevedo tried to draw his gun, but he tripped on uneven pavement, he says — and Randolph jumped on him with the knife raised.

Investigators ultimately determined the fatal shooting was justified and that the rookie officer had saved Azevedo's life.

Though he agrees that Officer Darren Wilson was justified in shooting Brown, he also says that shooting might have been avoided if Wilson had waited and called for backup.