Normally, people who write newspaper headlines are notorious for removing any word that they could possibly cut — often paring away so many words that they leave ambiguous or utterly cryptic headlines.^[1] Not always, though:

Officer-involved shooting leaves 1 dead

Sometimes, an officer is involved. Ever notice how far a newspaper writer will go, when an officer is involved, just to avoid writing Police killed a man in so many words?

Here’s the story to go with the headline:

Metro Police are investigating a deadly officer-involved shooting Sunday morning near Buffalo and Alta Drives.

According to police, the incident was a neighbor dispute with possible shots fired on the 7000 block of Palmdale Avenue. SWAT teams were called out to assist as the barricaded male suspect was shot and transported to University Medical Center where he died of his injuries.

“At some point the individual came out carrying a rifle. Our hostage negotiators asked a number of times for the subject to put down the rifle and at some point raised the rifle in their direction, ” Metro Capt. Matt McCarthy said. Several of our officers fired on our subject to stop the threat and the subject went down.”

No officers were injured.

–Jonathan Cisowski and Mauricio Marin, Officer-involved shooting leaves 1 dead
LasVegasNOW.com (23 Sextilis 2015)

Metro Police have shot eight people in Las Vegas this year. They killed five of the eight people they’ve shot.

Also.

• GT 2010-01-08: Officer Involvement
• George Orwell (1946), Politics and the English Language

1. ^[1]See, for example, the ongoing series of Language Log posts on Crash Blossoms.↩