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In January 1979, two LAPD officers shot Eula Love dead on her front lawn as they escorted a utility company employee who had come to cut off her service. In Love's purse when the officers killed her was a $22.09 money order to pay her outstanding gas bill.
As was their usual practice, the LAPD immediately went to work smearing Eula Love, with one of the officers who killed her describing her as a "raging, frothing at the mouth, knife-wielding woman.” Despite the racist claims, there's no evidence Love ever brandished a knife.
The case garnered national attention and media outlets began reproducing a phrase that had begun appearing in the LA Times and other local media outlets a few years early, in the mid-1970s: "officer-involved shooting."
This strange phrase, coupled with the LAPD's attempts to portray Eula Love as irresponsible and dangerous accomplished exactly what the department had hoped it would - deflected blame from the officers who gunned down someone who was just trying to pay her utility bill.
In the decades since the police killing of Eula Love, police violence against Black people has continued unabated. But now the confusing, intentionally misleading phrase that was institutionalized by the LAPD has become a mainstay among every law enforcement agency.
In no other context do reporters go to such great lengths to muddle meaning and obscure what actually happened. The same lot who argue over commas and em dashes, and care so much about precision in language are so often reflexively willing to use an inelegant, unclear euphemism.
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