Two Shootings, Two Stories: The Narrative Politics of Law Enforcement in Northern Kentucky

Hello, followers.

At some point, I intend to bifurcate my general writing from my reporting and commentary on events in my home region of Northern Kentucky, where a rather large corruption and public-integrity story is unfolding—one with considerable significance for me personally, but also, I believe, for the broader public interest.

For now, however, you will have to bear with me when I occasionally turn my attention homeward.

Recently, two fatal police shootings in Northern Kentucky have drawn public attention. On the surface, they are very different cases. I am not suggesting that the shootings themselves were legally or factually equivalent. But the public narratives that formed around them reveal something deeper about how institutions in the region understand violence, legitimacy, and their own relationship with the public.

The first occurred on June 19.

Police in Lakeside Park and Crestview Hills responded to a residence after the Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services requested assistance with an investigation involving two young children, ages three and five. There had reportedly been concerns about the children being unsupervised and running through the neighborhood in various states of undress.

According to authorities, 37-year-old Daniel Bolinger emerged from the residence armed with a spear and advanced toward officers despite repeated commands to drop the weapon. Two officers opened fire, killing him.

Kenton County Commonwealth’s Attorney Rob Sanders subsequently cleared the officers of wrongdoing.

Whatever one thinks of the shooting itself—and the available facts may well support the conclusion that the officers reasonably perceived an imminent threat—what interests me here is the rhetoric that followed.

“If there’s any criticism of the officers, it’s that they didn’t shoot him sooner,” Sanders said at a press conference.

“He really put them in a very bad position, and they got uncomfortably close to Mr. Bolinger while he was armed with that spear.”

Sanders continued:

“If he was wanting to kill the officers, he picked a very ineffective way of going about it because I’d say 100 times out of 100 he is going to lose that fight by bringing a spear to a gunfight.”

The rhetoric is striking.

A man is dead. He had reportedly been drinking heavily. Authorities said he had no known prior criminal or mental-health history. Whatever happened in those final moments—and whatever legal justification the officers had for using deadly force—the public prosecutor did not merely explain the law or announce his conclusion. He ridiculed the dead man’s tactical incompetence.

He then placed the incident within a broader narrative: policing, he argued, is becoming increasingly dangerous in Kentucky and across the United States, with mental illness and drugs contributing to the danger.

And then, two weeks later, came another fatal confrontation.

On July 3, Boone County deputies responded to a domestic-violence complaint involving Dustin Zink, an off-duty Florence police officer. According to Kentucky State Police, Zink was armed, threatened to harm himself and others, fired his weapon multiple times, and was ultimately shot and killed by responding deputies.

Here, however, the narrative register changed almost completely.

We know from reporting that Boone County deputies knew Zink. We have seen an outpouring of grief from public officials and members of the law-enforcement community. His department mourned him publicly and emphasized that one moment should not define an entire person.

That sentiment, considered in isolation, is humane. A human life is larger than its worst moment. A person who dies during an apparent psychological crisis does not cease to have a family, friends, colleagues, accomplishments, virtues, or a history.

But that is precisely the point.

Where was that interpretive generosity in the Bolinger case?

Why, in one case, do we hear mockery about “bringing a spear to a gunfight,” followed by sweeping warnings about the dangers faced by police officers? Yet in another case—when the armed person was himself a police officer—the emphasis shifts toward grief, complexity, reputation, and the insistence that a person must not be reduced to the circumstances of his death?

And where, in the public mourning surrounding Zink, is the corresponding concern for the alleged victims of the domestic disturbance that brought deputies to the scene in the first place?

This is not an argument that Zink should be demonized. It is an argument that the public should notice who is granted complexity—and who is not.

I use the term counterinsurgency narrative deliberately, but also carefully, and I invoke this term because of a very helpful framework put forward by civil rights attorney Alec Karakatsanis in his incredible book Copaganda (which I highly recommend).

I am not claiming that Northern Kentucky is literally an insurgency zone, nor that local police departments are consciously implementing some formal military doctrine against the population.

I am describing a way of constructing political reality.

Counterinsurgency, at the level of narrative, divides the social field into fundamentally different categories. There is the institution and the population aligned with it; there are the dangerous, disordered, or potentially hostile elements outside it; and there is the uncertain public whose perception must constantly be managed.

Within this narrative structure, violence does not carry the same meaning depending on who commits it and against whom it is directed.

When an outsider threatens a police officer, the incident becomes evidence of a larger social pathology: drugs, mental illness, criminality, declining respect for authority, the increasing danger of police work.

The individual becomes representative of a class.

But when a member of the law-enforcement community is accused of violence, the interpretive movement often runs in the opposite direction. The incident is individualized. It becomes a tragedy, a crisis, an aberration, a terrible moment in an otherwise complicated human life.

The class disappears, and the individual reappears.

This asymmetry matters.

Daniel Bolinger allegedly advances toward police with a spear, and the Commonwealth’s Attorney publicly jokes that he brought the wrong weapon to the fight. The event is then incorporated into a broader story about the dangers confronting law enforcement (despite the fact that Sanders implies that the danger was miniscule with his joke).

Dustin Zink, an off-duty police officer, allegedly threatens himself and others with a firearm during a domestic disturbance and fires multiple shots. The public narrative emphasizes mourning, service, personal complexity, and the proposition that one moment should not define a man.

Again: I am not arguing that Zink should be denied compassion. I am asking why compassion appears to be distributed according to institutional proximity.

The same act of humanization should be available to everyone. And the same standard of scrutiny should apply to everyone. That is what is called the rule of law.

If Bolinger’s actions can be used to make broader claims about social disorder and the dangers faced by police, then an armed domestic disturbance involving a police officer cannot automatically be quarantined from broader questions about police culture, domestic violence, psychological distress, firearm access, or institutional accountability.

Conversely, if Zink deserves to be remembered as more than the worst moments of his life—and he does—then perhaps public officials should consider whether civilians killed by police also deserve to be discussed with a minimum of dignity.

This is where narrative becomes a form of power.

Institutions do not merely investigate events. They classify them. They decide which facts become socially meaningful and which remain incidental. They decide whose violence represents a systemic threat and whose violence represents an individual tragedy. They decide who is permitted a biography and who is reduced to the weapon in his hand.

And the public, if it is not attentive, begins to inherit these categories unconsciously.

The result, certainly in our community, is a moral geography in which law enforcement occupies the center, and everyone else is arranged according to proximity to it. Threats against officers become threats against public order itself. Misconduct or violence involving officers becomes a matter of individual complexity. The institution remains the stable point from which everyone else is judged.

That is the deeper pattern I believe deserves examination. When we look at these two incidents side by side, the question before us is not whether the officers who shot Daniel Bolinger were legally justified. They may have been. The question is not whether Dustin Zink’s family, friends, and colleagues are entitled to mourn him. Of course they are.

Rather, the question is why our institutions—and many of the people who speak for them—appear to possess two different moral vocabularies. One vocabulary is reserved for those outside the circle: danger, disorder, drugs, mental illness, criminality, tactical failure. The other is reserved for those within it: tragedy, service, complexity, grief, context, redemption.

Allow me to say, dear reader, that a healthy system of public accountability cannot operate that way.

The state possesses extraordinary power. Police officers carry weapons, exercise coercive authority, and are entrusted with powers that ordinary citizens do not possess. Prosecutors determine whom the state will pursue and, often just as importantly, whom it will not. That authority requires not merely legal compliance but intellectual discipline: the ability to apply the same moral imagination to the governed that institutions instinctively apply to their own.

Northern Kentucky does not need less compassion for police officers. It needs a public culture in which compassion, scrutiny, dignity, and accountability are not distributed according to whether a person has a badge (or has family or friends with a badge).

Once a society begins dividing the world into those whose actions reveal a dangerous class and those whose actions are merely unfortunate exceptions, it is no longer simply describing events.

It is teaching the public whom to fear, whom to forgive, and whom to believe.