You roll up on a job and there’s a man standing in the street, shouting and cursing. And, oh yes, he’s got a pistol in his hand. Eventually, as backup arrives, he’s seriously out-gunned by you and your fellow police officers. You think the job is under control because nobody in his right mind would fight those kinds of odds. Ordered to put down his gun, he just stands there, his arms at his side, looking at the pavement.

Then it happens.

He looks up and shouts, “Shoot me, shoot me!” at the top of his lungs, suddenly pointing the gun at an officer. Shots ring out and he falls to the ground, dead, having gotten his wish.

It’s called “suicide by cop.”

A particularly poignant example occurred just recently, in Columbus Ohio. A 76-year-old man shot his hopelessly ill 78-year-old wife to death in her hospital bed. Then he pointed a gun at police officers who came to his house to question him. Of course, they were forced to shoot him, fatally. He had left them a note: “Sorry, officers.”

A more local recent example happened just last year in Transit District 2. Police Officer Marko Mibailovich confronted a suspect who had pistol-whipped and robbed a man, then tried to escape by running into the subway and onto the tracks.

After a foot chase, the armed suspect turned on Mibailovich and charged at him, screaming, “Shoot me. Shoot me.” The cop had no choice but to shoot him dead. Officer Mibailovich was given a PBA “Finest of the Finest” award for making that reluctant but necessary choice.

“Suicide by cop” has had that name since the early 1990’s but it’s been around a lot longer than that — as a matter of fact, as long as there have been cops and the emotionally disturbed and the just plain desperate. But it’s only recently that any official law enforcement body has begun to take a look at the extent of the phenomenon and how it can be defined and tracked. And it’s about time.

A recent FBI bulletin — “Suicide by Cop: Defining a Devastating Dilemma” — is that first in-depth examination. The bulletin seeks to define the problem, understand why it’s so difficult to measure the extent of it, and, finally, to determine what can be done to reduce its incidence and protect police officers and the public alike.

We believe that suicide by cop should be tracked by the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) program the same way it tracks bias crimes. To do that, however, there has to be a commonly accepted definition of the term. “But a clear and uniformly accepted definition has yet to surface,” says the FBI bulletin.

“Therefore, just as with hate crime, the adoption of a national definition of suicide by cop, criteria to determine what constitutes such acts, and a reporting mechanism to record these incidents must occur to enable the law enforcement community to effectively address the devastation brought about by this phenomenon.”

The bulletin goes on to question what facts and circumstances need to be present to enable law enforcement to categorize a justifiable police shooting as a suicide by cop. Based on the research for the bulletin, the authors have developed a definition based on UCR guidelines: “An act motivated in whole or in part by the offender’s desire to commit suicide that results in a justifiable homicide by a law enforcement officer.”

Police shootings are generally traumatic for the officer who fired. Nobody wants to live with the knowledge that they had to kill someone who might have lived given some therapy or social support. Sometimes the gun used by the offender is unloaded or an imitation gun. The police officer staring down the barrel of that weapon can’t be expected to know this. The officer has to act to preserve his or her own life and the lives of innocent bystanders.

Establishing a “suicide by cop” category in the UCR would go a long way to helping police officers deal with the tragedy of these justifiable shootings. In a way, it makes it clear and official that blame for the death lies squarely with the deceased and not with the cop. That should help officers deal with the trauma of these tragic shootings. It’s an idea whose time has come.