EDITORIAL FINDING ANSWERS DEVIN BROWN SHOOTING EXPOSES KEY ISSUES.

IT could be weeks or months before we know what happened the night Officer Steve Garcia shot and killed 13-year-old Devin Brown, who had been joy riding in a stolen car.

But all the tinkering with police policy, all the rehashing of details will not change one fact that undoubtedly contributed to the senseless death of this young man: It never should have come to a confrontation in the darkness between a cop with a gun and a kid with a car.

This youth was on a downward trajectory since his father's death more than a year ago, but he found no safety net to help him before he ended up behind the wheel of a stolen car with an LAPD officer leveling his weapon at him.

In response to the death, Mayor James Hahn pushed the Police Commission to come up with a more restrictive shooting policy for LAPD officers. Maybe this new policy would have prevented Brown from being shot that night - maybe not. But it couldn't have done anything to prevent the series of unfortunate events that led up to that moment.

For weeks before the shooting, Brown was skipping classes at Audubon Middle School. Was there adequate truancy intervention? Did anyone notice that Brown was flailing? Did anyone care enough to try to do something about it?

The problems exposed by this tragedy have to do with more than police shooting policy. And if we have any hope of preventing other kids from heading down similar paths, or keeping a cop from having to decide whether to shoot at a car bearing down on him, we need to fully understand what happened in the last year of Devin Brown's life.

If city leaders want to make a difference, they need to examine all aspects of the case. Surely, with all of the commissions in Los Angeles, one more could be impaneled that would examine the culture that Devin Brown lived in and the educational and social services systems that were supposed to help him.

We must learn from incidents like this so they don't happen over and over. Nothing would be a better tribute to his life than to have better answers for troubled teenagers in the future than the ones Devin Brown found.