lieutenant and the sergeant then stood up at the table and, with their respective revolver muzzles nearly touching, blazed away with four shots each. Customers and restaurant employees dived for cover, narrowly escaping wounds or death. The sergeant and lieutenant, unscathed by the fusillade, were then subdued and disarmed by their fellow officers. After a fast trip to police headquarters, where they were suspended by the superintendent, the officers returned to Fabacher's to finish their meal, their brisk little firefight apparently mutually forgiven if not forgotten.' As a paradigm of police use of deadly force in nineteenth-century New Orleans, the McLaughlin-Reynolds incident exposes several salient themes: the policemen involved irresponsibly discharged their revolvers, recklessly endangered not only their own lives but those of several presumably innocent bystanders, and demonstrated abysmal marksmanship by missing one another entirely at pointblank range in an exchange of nine shots. The judicial and administrative outcome is equally instructive. Lieutenant Reynolds escaped any punishment; Sergeant McLaughlin received a stern reprimand from the mayor, along with a suspension of twenty-seven days that was later rescinded with an award of back pay. The McLaughlin-Reynolds shooting was in many ways exemplary of a problem that has beset New Orleans, and other places, for a long time. How does a democratic society give its police the power to do their job and protect themselves without