Earlier this week, I wrote about the Austin Police Department, use of force policies, and the officer who was fired for shooting a naked unarmed 17-year old male.
I have two followups to that.
Austin has an organization called the Office of the Police Monitor. This is an organization independent of the APD; the basic idea is that they serve as a civilian oversight organization for the police. They’re the ones who issued that report on stops and searches I touched on a while back.
Part of what they do is monitor Internal Affairs investigations, and make recommendations as they see fit. You might correctly guess that they were involved in the shooting investigation.
The Stateman published a story late yesterday afternoon about one of the OPM’s recommendations as a result of this incident: they want a trainer at the police academy reassigned.
Yes, a trainer. Why? I’m going to put a break here because this is running long…
It sounds like they don’t like what he told them in his interview. Here’s one highlight:
When asked whether cadets are taught if it is acceptable to back away from a person wielding a knife, the trainer said it was an option, but trainers will stop exercises if a cadet takes no action and will ask why the cadet did that.
“Here in Texas, here in APD, we don’t have a duty to retreat, and we are not asking our officers to retreat all the way out the door and get back in their cars and go home,” the report quotes the trainer as saying. “They need to take some kinda action.”
With all due respect to the OPM, that actually sounds to me like a very reasonable position. I don’t think we expect the police to allow people wielding knives (and I interpret “wielding” to mean “waving around wildly and threatening people”, not just carrying them) to run down the street unopposed. And I think an officer is much more vulnerable trying frantically to back away. To put it another way, “When a naked man is chasing a woman through an alleyway with a butcher knife and a hard-on, I figure he isn’t out collecting for the Red Cross.”
This also strikes me as being a tactical decision that should be made by the officer on the scene. Does the person seem amenable to reason, or are they hopped up on goofballs? Is the officer in a position, or can he get into one, where he can deploy less than lethal options like bean bag rounds?
There’s a commonly quoted idea called the “Tuller Rule” or “21-Foot-Rule”: “…Tueller—who is now retired—wrote an article saying it was entirely possible for a suspect armed with an edged weapon to fatally engage an officer armed with a handgun within a distance of 21 feet. The so-called ’21-Foot Rule’ was born and soon spread throughout the law enforcement community.”
Things are slightly more complicated than that:
I like this quote:
But I think I’ve kind of wandered off track here. My main point, again, is that the statement that “here in APD, we don’t have a duty to retreat, and we are not asking our officers to retreat all the way out the door and get back in their cars and go home” does not strike me as being wrong or unreasonable.
The trainer also told investigators Freeman’s actions didn’t appear to violate Austin police policies, though a portion of that exchange is redacted from the report released to the American-Statesman. However, the trainer told investigators he could see why Freeman opened fire.
“So again that’s up to the individual officer’s choice,” he said. “I can understand why he (Freeman) did that.”
That may be a little less reasonable, but: what’s being discussed here is not the actual facts of the case, but the trainer’s perception of what happened based on what he knew at the time he was being interviewed. His opinion might have changed based on the results of the investigation: we don’t know.
And speaking of unknowns, I can’t find this particular report on the OPM’s website yet: I’m relying on what the Statesman says. The OPM website does have a version (with some redactions) of the memo Chief Acevedo issued on the firing. Reading over that, it seems like the main justification for the firing is the classic “violation of department policies”. Specifically, it seems that the officer is being terminated because:
- He chose to approach the suspect, who he suspected of suffering from “excited delirium”, without waiting for other officers as backup.
- He had access to “less-than-lethal” weapons, which he didn’t use: in addition to a Taser and pepper spray, he also had a beanbag shotgun in the trunk of his patrol car.
So I can see the argument for the firing, though I would not be shocked if this is overturned by an arbitrator. I can’t really see the OPM’s problem with the trainer, though. Perhaps I’m wrong; if so, I welcome comments.
In any case, the OPM has no real power over APD. They can make recommendations to the chief, as they’ve done in this case. The chief is free to accept or disregard them. On the other hand, the OPM is free to take their recommendations to the city manager and council if the chief disregards them: if the situation is serious enough, the city might put pressure on the chief (or, heck, even fire him). On the gripping hand, for the OPM to go to the city manager and council because the chief disregarded a recommendation would almost be a declaration of all out war between the OPM and the APD. I don’t think anybody’s going to win that.
I hope to have part 2 up in a couple of hours. Most of it was already written by another person: I just need to make some small edits before I post it.