An agency we need to launch

On the NTSB, local sheriffs, and the need to study problems that we should want to solve

An Illinois woman was shot and killed by a police officer in her own home after calling 911 to report suspicions of a prowler. She seems to have alarmed the officer after moving towards a pot of boiling water on a stovetop.

■ The sheriff's deputy who shot and killed the woman is facing murder charges and has been fired by his department. But entirely beyond the criminal trial process that is taking shape, some institution needs to be responsible for assessing the circumstances that led up to the incident and making clear recommendations for avoiding similar circumstances in the future.

■ The US needs an agency modeled after the NTSB, with a charge to investigate the causes and circumstances of civilian deaths when in contact with police and to supply recommendations to reduce the number of those incidents. Like the NTSB, it needs to be separate from and independent of any other regulatory or law-enforcement agencies, so that it can furnish thorough and objective advice to the public and to policy-makers — not to prosecute, but to avoid unnecessary repeat failures.

■ If we don't like an outcome, it's up to us as a society to study and measure the causes, and then to take deliberate action to change the course of events. Failure to do so only ensures that more undesirable events will occur. The deaths of people in their own homes after they have called for help surely must rank high on the list of undesirable events worthy of concerted effort toward a correction.