I've covered a number of homicides, and when I arrive at a crime scene, I usually find one of two situations: If the crime just happened, I generally find an area cordoned off with police tape and crawling with officers. If it's the day after a killing, I normally find a quiet street with little evidence of the recent tragedy.

When I arrived on Stanford Avenue on Tuesday morning, more than 12 hours had transpired since someone gunned down Victor Navarro, 33, of Santa Barbara, and seriously wounded another man about 7:20 p.m. Monday.

This was one of those cases where the scene of the crime held few reminders of the terrible thing that transpired there.

One of my colleagues had been there the night before, but he didn't get much information because the whole area was blocked off and called a crime scene.

I pulled up about 9 a.m.

Cars lined Stanford Avenue, a residential street of single-family homes. The street was tidy and the houses looked well cared for. One house had pinwheels near the front door. Several had political signs on their lawns.

There were no police cars, and no crime tape. No obvious stains on the asphalt.

The only obvious reminder of the shooting was a series of orange markings on the ground, the kind police use during their investigations.

The small orange lines lined up with the wheels of many cars near the scene of the crime.

I talked to a few neighbors. Some said they didn't know anything about what happened. One said she heard shots but didn't want to give her name because she was afraid.

A reporter from a Spanish-language news television channel was on scene with a cameraman. We chatted about what we'd heard then went our sort of separate ways, interviewing people briefly as they stopped their cars to see what we wanted. Then I continued wandering, talking to people who happened to be around.

I heard a few rumors but few facts.

Some neighbors said the shooting shocked them. A few said the neighborhood was usually quiet. Some disagreed.

A few bits of information I gathered at the scene helped me frame my questions to police.

Reflecting back on the 90 minutes or so I spent at the scene of the crime, I have to say I found what I expected to find, which wasn't too much.

It feels strange, almost disrespectful, to say the scene of a killing was average, but this one seemed to be, at least from a reporter's perspective at the moment I was there.

Murders change everything for the family and friends of the victim. Some victims' families return frequently to the scene of their loved one's death as part of their grieving.

But if the scene of this crime told a story, it was ethereal.

The scene spoke of the fear violence inspires; of the challenge of learning what really happened, and why; of the vulnerability of human life...  

There was an officer-involved shooting in Ventura yesterday, so I thought this would be an opportune time to take a moment to discuss this kind of incident.

Like many of the things I write about as a police reporter, officer-involved shootings are very different than they are often portrayed in much of television and cinema.

In the almost two years I have covered cops and breaking news in Ventura County, I have reported on several of these incidents.

I think the phrase "officer-involved shooting" says some important things on its own.

Law enforcement, like many specialties, frequently uses its own vocabulary, but this phrase is hard to get around. It is used to describe any incident where an officer fires a weapon, and as such it is accurate but a little non-specific.

Think about possible alternatives:

If an incident was called an officer shooting, it would imply that an officer had been shot. If it was called a shooting by an officer, it might imply that the officer was at fault.

The phrase, officer-involved shooting, on the other hand, makes it clear that an officer was involved in a shooting incident, but stays distant from anything that could be perceived as a factual statement or judgment about who was at fault or why the officer decided he or she had to shoot.

This all points to the seriousness with which these incidents are handled.

Unlike movies or television shows where officers often run around with guns blazing, in the real world it's a big deal whenever an officer uses potentially deadly force.

When such a shooting happens, the department whose officer was involved typically keeps information very close to their vest.

For example, in the two fatal officer-involved shootings I covered, departments waited days before releasing the name of the officer.

The names were released more quickly in the two officer-involved shootings involving the Ventura Police Department this year. The suspect who was shot survived in both of those shootings.

This time, the department also released a picture of the knife the suspect allegedly had in his possession when he confronted the officer. I didn't expect to get something like this, frankly.

Here it is:


It should be no surprise that police departments carefully calculate their responses to these incidents.

In both fatal officer-involved shootings I covered, relatives of those killed filled wrongful death lawsuits.

In addition, the District Attorney's Office investigates each use of deadly force.

To deem a shooting justified, the DA's office has to determine that "a reasonable person in the same circumstances" would believe him or herself (or someone else) was in danger of death or great bodily injury, Chief Assistant Ventura County District Attorney Jim Ellison told me.

If the DA's office decides a shooting was unjustified, prosecutors can pursue a criminal charge.

When someone is killed, the DA's office usually produces a public report on the incident.

These reports can take a very long time. Several reports came out this year about fatal officer-involved shootings that occurred in 2006.

When the person shot is facing a criminal prosecution, the office doesn't produce a report, Ellison said.

The rationale is that the information will come out in trial, and the DA's office doesn't want to interfere in a prosecution, Ellison said.

That means that unless something drastic changes, there won't be a public report from the DA's office on yesterday's officer-involved shooting.

Here are some of our recent stories involving officer-involved shootings:

Ventura officer shoots teen after police car rammed

Two officers cleared in fatal shooting

Deputy ruled justified in shooting of man

Mother files claim in son's shooting death

Officer who killed suspect is identified

Details emerge in shooting of former Seabee

Oxnard police on hunt for suspect linked to businessman's killing

And while I was looking up officer-involved shootings, I found this interesting study on the National Institute of Justice Web site about police responses to shootings:

National Institute of Justice

It's big, it's hungry and it craves information.

It's always out there, and no matter what you feed it today, it's going to be hungry again tomorrow.

It's the news hole, the seemingly infinite public desire for information.

In journalism circles, it's known as the Beast, because every day we have to make sure we have information to feed it. If we don't, we might cease to exist.

And nowhere is the beast more ravenous than in the world of breaking news.

(Well, at least from my perspective as a breaking news reporter ... but really, I'm pretty sure it's not more ravenous anywhere else ... Anyway ...)

In times past, reporters rushed to get the story for the next day's paper, or maybe the evening edition. If you were a radio reporter you might break into a broadcast. A television reporter would hustle to make deadline before a newscast.

But that was before 24 hour T.V. Way before the Internet.

In the digital age, we don't feed the Beast once a day, we feed it constantly.

I was thinking about this on Wednesday after a long day of covering a homicide in Camarillo.

(Here's the final story: http://www.venturacountystar.com/news/2008/aug/07/passenger-fatally-shoots-man-in-vehicle/)

I started covering the story shortly after 6 a.m. when I heard from the Sheriff's watch commander that deputies were investigating a possible homicide.

After putting a brief on the web, I hurried to the scene, called back to the officer to report the little I could find out, talked to the Sheriff's spokesman, and shot some video.

Then I went back to the office and put an updated story on the web.

A short time later, I called the medical examiner's office, added the shooting victim's name to the web story.

Then I set to work on a short video about the homicide.

Now, all this time, I wasn't working in a vacuum.

The local radio station, KVTA, was putting up updates, too (there were probably other news outlets involved too. That was the only one I was watching, though). And if they had something we didn't, people commenting on our web site let us know lickety-split.

When the radio reported first that the Sheriff's department had named a suspect, for example, I heard about it from colleagues and hurried to add that to my web story.

All this while, I'm trying to get in touch with family members of the victim. They are grieving, of course, and understandably busy, so I'm trying to conform to their schedule. I'm happy they want to talk to me at all.

Still, I have to drop what I'm doing to update the web story when we learn that the suspect in the homicide has been arrested.

(At some point during the tumult, I finish the video so we can put it on the web, and I speak to the shooting victim's brother.)

Later we find out that there's a press conference near the crime scene, and my breaking news partner, John Scheibe, rushes out to cover that.

With the information he gets and an additional interview with the Sheriff's spokesman I rewrite the story for publication.

Just as I finish, coworkers stop by to ask if I have anything new.

Readers are already clamoring for more.