29 November—A Waterbury police detective who in February shot at but missed a man who had shot and hit him in the thigh was justified in discharging his firearm, according to a ruling issued on Wednesday by the state’s inspector general. Wow, you’re thinking, so what’s the big deal?

Well, first, Connecticut’s Office of Inspector General was established by legislation only a few years ago—largely as a reaction to public outrage at abuse and misuse of force and lack of accountability by law-enforcement personnel, including prosecutors—specifically to investigate incidents in which police and corrections officers use “deadly physical force” which may or may not result in the death or injury of a person in or intended to be in custody. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether anybody is actually injured or killed, only that force was involved in the incident.

So that’s why the shooting was investigated even though the actual victim of deadly force was the police officer rather than the criminal (technically the “alleged” criminal because he hasn’t been convicted yet) and the facts aren’t in dispute—until a defense lawyer enters the picture, of course, and the felonious shooter gets off with a slap on the wrist, as is not uncommon in Connecticut.

But why has it taken the inspector general the better part of a year to determine the obvious? Since the notorious slug of Connecticut justice crawls very slowly, it probably has nothing to do with the fact that the current inspector general came on the job mid-inspection, as it were, while his staff was presumably performing due diligence on the Waterbury incident as well as the score of others they’re charged with investigating, most of which may be less open-and-shut.

And the unlucky Waterbury cop who presumably has recovered by now and is back on the job may actually have been lucky that he missed his target. Because the new inspector general is Eliot Prescott.

You may recall that Prescott was the presiding judge on the Robert Fisher trial. After a six-person jury in Torrington convicted physically unfit septuagenarian Bob Fisher of first-degree manslaughter for defending himself against a young, physically fit, alcohol-crazed attacker, Prescott refused to do the right thing and overrule the anti-lawyer jury, even though it was his responsibility to nullify an unjust verdict and within his power to issue a so-called judgement notwithstanding verdict. And then Prescott added injury to insult by sticking Fisher behind bars for two-and-a-half years and refusing to grant appellate bond.

It’s not unlikely that Prescott would have been similarly unjust to a police officer for defending himself with “deadly physical force” . . .