When 17-year-old John Albers posted threats of suicide on social media in January 2018, worried friends called 911 for help. The high school student was backing his family minivan out of the garage when he was shot 13 times by an Overland Park, Kan. police officer who responded to the call and said he feared he’d be struck by the van. Within a month, the prosecutor in Johnson County, Kan., Steve Howe, declared that the fatal shooting was justified and charges would not be filed.

Every year in America, police fatally shoot about 1,000 people. In each case, police — often from the same department — investigate the officer, and it’s rare that details of the investigation are made public. But in the case of the death of Albers, something extremely unusual happened: the city of Overland Park released the entire police investigative file and corresponding visuals, after being sued by KSHB-TV. In this case, the Overland Park police did not investigate their own officer. Instead, Johnson County launches an Officer-Involved Shooting Investigation Team after each such incident, using officers from other departments in the county.

The nearly 500-page file revealed the investigation was concluded in six days. The Washington Post provided it to five law enforcement experts, veterans of policing, use-of-force investigations and prosecutions. All five found flaws with the investigation, and several said investigators approached the case favoring the perception of the officer, a stance the experts said is common in such cases. The Post’s analysis found steps missing from the investigative report, such as scene diagrams, that some experts said are typically performed in officer-involved shooting investigations.

The Post also created a 3D reconstruction, based on available evidence, to show Jenison’s position at each of the moments he fired at Albers. The 3D reconstruction and dash-cam videos showed Albers was close to the van when it first backed out of the garage, and then briefly in the path of the van after it spun around, but he moved out of the van’s path each time and then fired.

The Post took the police investigative file, dash-cam videos, expert analysis, interviews with the Albers family and the 3D reconstruction to create an inside look into how police investigated one of their own. Read more: https://wapo.st/3AHlSsA. Subscribe to The Washington Post on YouTube: https://wapo.st/2QOdcqK

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