Philadelphia police officer Cyrus Mann stood on a rain-slicked road, pointed his gun at a moving car and pulled the trigger five times, hitting the driver.
The next year, he chased an unarmed man down an alley and shot him in the back.
Two years later, he fired his gun four times at a man he had stopped for a suspected traffic violation.
Most officers will never fire their weapons while on duty. Mann, a nine-year member of the Philadelphia Police Department, shot three people in just over three years. The shooting in the alley, on Aug. 9, 2012, would prove fatal and prompt the police commissioner to try to fire Mann.
Like many police chiefs across the nation, he would fail.
A Washington Post investigation found that hundreds of police officers who were fired for misconduct, including allegations of sexual assault and drug trafficking, have been reinstated. Since 2006, at least 451 of 1,800 officers fired from 37 of the nations largest departments have won their jobs back through appeals provided for in union contracts.
Manns history on the force offers one of the starkest examples, from hundreds of cases The Post examined, of how little power police chiefs hold in deciding which officers remain in their ranks. What is known about Mann has been culled from interviews, publicly available law enforcement records and hundreds of pages of civil and criminal court documents, which include copies of some police records.
By the time he was fired, records show, Mann had also been accused of lunging at a superior officer and had been described to a jury by a defense attorney as a nightmare to the citizens of Philadelphia.
Of the 71 officers who fought to get their jobs back in that city, police were forced to rehire 44, more than in any other department examined by The Post.
You would want to believe that if people were terminated, if proper investigations and protocols were followed, they were terminated for a reason, said Philadelphia Police Commissioner Richard Ross Jr. There are occasions that you are frustrated, not just the police commissioner but even sometimes rank and file as well as commanders, because youll get people who get their jobs back and you are completely baffled and dismayed by it.
