THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

When doing something not natural, like killing another human, the first one is a difficult step. After that the next one comes easy. And a study done of police officers involved in shootings shows that

more than a few have done it before.

More than 50 police officers involved in fatal shootings this year had previously fired their guns in deadly on-duty shootings, according to a Washington Post investigation.

For a handful of officers, it was their third fatal shooting. For one officer, it was his fourth.

The findings concerned many law enforcement experts, who said most officers never fire their weapons on the job. The analysis also exposed another gap in the federal government’s oversight of fatal police shootings nationwide: the absence of a system for tracking multiple shootings by individual officers.

The 55 officers were identified as part of a Post project tracking all fatal shootings by police in the line of duty in 2015. It is the first nationwide attempt to determine whether fatal police shootings are isolated events in an officer’s career or whether some officers repeatedly fire their weapons in deadly encounters.

The Post also found that another 45 officers had previously been involved in non-fatal shootings.

“It’s a national embarrassment. We don’t even know how many times cops pull their triggers,” said Geoffrey Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina.

In most cases, the person killed was armed and the shootings were found to be justified by authorities or were still under investigation. The shootings cut across departments of all sizes, involved officers on a range of assignments and grew out of circumstances such as routine patrols, undercover police operations and standoffs with SWAT teams that spanned hours...

Policing experts said the phenomenon has not been deeply studied nationwide, and a deeper review of the cases could root out officers who resort too often to deadly force and help officials develop strategies for officers to defuse — or avoid — volatile situations.

Studies in the military have shown a similar concentration of shooters to those who don't shoot. But in the military they are supposed to shoot as a first resort. For police, deadly force should e the last resort.