Abstract
At 4:15 on the rainy afternoon of February 3, 1975, a San Diego Sheriff's Department SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team mistakenly shot and killed fifteen-year-old Leland Phelps in Oceanside, California. The boy was being held hostage by a barricaded sniper. Seconds after Phelps was shot his captor, an out-of-work twenty-year-old carpenter, took his own life. A large gathering of spectators had pressed in to watch the drama. Many who saw what happened, and many others who later analyzed it on the basis of reports, blamed the police for the outcome. There is a widespread feeling that the police themselves created the situation, spawning circumstances of confusion and fear from which, in the language of law enforcement, “fatal force” was the logical result.
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