Behind the barrel: A police perspective of officer-involved shootings

In the days after Modesto police Sgt. Rigo DeAlba fatally shot a man in 2013, he thought about it “constantly.”

As the event replayed in his mind over and over, he tried to fill the holes in his memory and wondered if he could have done something differently.

Just two days after the incident, he was lifting weights at a gym when he heard two strangers talking about him and the other SWAT officer involved in the shooting. One of them was criticizing them for their actions, saying they never should have shot the 87-year-old man.

“A lot of things go through your mind like ‘you have no idea what you are talking about, you don’t know the situation.’ But people come to their conclusions,” DeAlba said.

Since Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Mo., in August 2014, use of force by police officers has been under scrutiny across the country.

Last month six Baltimore police officers were arrested on charges ranging from second-degree murder to assault in the death of a suspect who suffered a spinal cord injury in their custody. In South Carolina, an officer was charged with murder after shooting an unarmed man who was running away from him. And the FBI is investigating whether 10 deputies in San Bernardino County violated a suspect’s civil rights when they repeatedly kicked and punched him.

National media and the public have homed in on these possible abuses of power. But the majority of the cases are ultimately determined to be justified. And, for the officer or deputy, they are events they wish could have been avoided, said psychologist Phil Trompetter.

“There are only two people who know what actually happened ... the shooter and the person who got shot,” he said.

Trompetter spent 30 years contracting with local law enforcement agencies and has spoken to dozens of officers involved in shootings.

“Even in the most righteous and justifiable shootings, it is always an emotionally powerful event,” Trompetter said.

Four Modesto police officers who’ve had to make that split-second decision, including Police Chief Galen Carroll, described their experiences recently in interviews with The Modesto Bee. All of the cases were found by the District Attorney’s Office to be justified.

INCIDENTS STAY WITH OFFICERS

The emotions that arise in the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting are unique to each officer, but Trompetter said there are some commonalities.

Officers “wonder why they have trouble getting to sleep or why they may have had a nightmare of a deadly force situation and they find their gun isn’t in their holster or it won’t fire,” he said.

Sgt. Bobby Meredith said he’d never had that type of dream until after an Aug. 14, 2012, shooting.

He and officer John Moss fatally shot a man who’d stabbed a 17-year-old boy before driving a Chevrolet Tahoe full speed into a neighbor’s home, pinning a pregnant woman under the front door.

“All of a sudden, I hear him put it in reverse and the wheels start screeching and there’s smoke from the tires burning out,” Meredith said. “I made a conscious decision that if he gets loose again he’s going to drive over more people and I didn’t know who was underneath the car. I knew my partner, John Moss, was generally behind the vehicle.”

He said he and Moss began shooting at almost the same time.

Since the shooting, Meredith said, he’s dreamed of situations in which he’s forced to use his gun but it won’t fire or it has no effect on the suspect.

He also dreams of a very different outcome to another incident, which happened at a home on Evona Court in March 2013. Meredith, DeAlba and Detective Gary Guffey were part of a SWAT team that rescued an 87-year-old woman after an 11-hour standoff with her husband, who had beaten her and left her incapacitated on the kitchen floor.

Meredith and another officer carried her to safety. “I have had dreams about going in there and getting shot while we are carrying her.”

In reality, the husband pointed a gun at the team but was shot by DeAlba and Guffey before he could fire. SWAT officers had been watching the husband’s behavior and devised a plan they’d hoped would avoid contact with him, but he came through the kitchen as they were trying to get his wife out of the house.

MEMORY GAPS

After shootings, officers may also experience gaps in their memory of the incident, or recall it in slow motion, Trompetter said. Sometimes they have been surprised by the event.

What special victims Detective Steve Anderson remembers most about his shooting was “that it was unpredictable. It wasn’t something that I ever would have thought was going to happen, but it did,” he said. “I’ve been working in the special victims unit for five years and I’ve arrested many, many people and it has not come to that.”

On July 12, 2012, Anderson radioed for backup to arrest a 68-year-old man who’d confessed during an interview at his home to inappropriately touching 13- and 18-year-old girls.

When Anderson returned to the suspect’s house with a patrol officer, the man asked if he was going to be arrested.

When Anderson told him yes, the suspect said he had a letter for the detective and went to a nearby desk. He pulled a nearly footlong hunting knife from the drawer. Anderson drew his gun and told him to drop it, but the man proceeded to stab himself in the neck several times.

“When he pulled out the knife, I asked the patrol officer to tase him,” Anderson said. “He was hurting himself and I was trying to save him at that point. When he turned the knife on us, then it was a reaction.”

Anderson fired several rounds, striking the suspect, who later died at a hospital.

It all happens within seconds, but when the officer recalls the incident later, the events often replay in slow motion, Trompetter said.

“When you get in these situations, these deadly force confrontations ... you have a lot of chemical reactions,” he said. “You focus in on that which is most critical to your survival, you get tunnel vision. We believe that is a biological imperative.”

When police Chief Galen Carroll was an officer in Long Beach in 2000, he and three of his colleagues returned fire on a gang member.

“I still remember the slide going back on my firearm,” Carroll said. “You can’t really see a slide going back, but that’s the way you remember it.”

The suspect had been involved in a shooting at a party earlier in the evening. He led officers on a high-speed pursuit until he lost control going around a corner and was surrounded by officers.

In a final attempt to escape, the suspect backed full speed into a patrol car, then began shooting at officers.

“His rear tires were on the hood of the police car; the exhaust melted its dash,” Carroll said.

Trompetter said “time distortion” is one of the most common reactions officers have after such incidents.

“You do a lot of thinking and make a lot of judgments and a lot of reasoning and behaving very quickly, and when you start putting it all together and start thinking about it afterward – because the officer or deputy is remembering so much detail that originally (took seconds) – it ends up equating to a slow-motion perception,” he said.

And then there are those moments that officers can’t remember.

The shooting on Evona Court was DeAlba’s second in his 15-year career. After each, he experienced voids in his memory of events, especially the moments after the shooting.

Four years into his career, he shot a man who was suspected of using a room at the Quality Inn on West Orangeburg Avenue as a warehouse for stolen property. DeAlba found the suspect in the hotel lobby; his hand was inside a large puffy jacket.

“I sensed quickly when I saw the suspect that he was going to flee from me,” DeAlba said. “He looked at me and then down toward the ground then up toward the hallway.”

The suspect ran to the back of the hotel, where another officer had driven his patrol car.

“I can remember another officer driving into the picture and hitting the suspect with his car,” DeAlba said. “I do not remember what that officer did or where he was after the suspect came off his car.”

After being hit by the car, the suspect kept running and that’s when DeAlba saw he had a gun in his hand. When the suspect turned and pointed it at DeAlba, the officer fired. The suspect survived and was charged with assault with a deadly weapon.

After the events on Evona Court, “I can remember small events and snapshots, but a lot happened in those time periods between the suspect falling and the suspect being secured,” DeAlba said. “If I were to tell the story in as much detail as I could and have the scenes re-enacted, I could provide great detail about the threat I saw and what it looked like, but surrounding stuff and some details immediately after, not so much.”

Meredith’s shooting was the first to be captured on the body cameras Modesto police had begun wearing the month before. The video showed him reloading his magazine and at one point shooting with one hand as he used the other to radio “shots fired,” none of which he says he remembered.

While the mind will want to fill the gaps with reasonable conclusions, Trompetter warns officers that when they are interviewed by Internal Affairs investigators or homicide detectives, they should tell only what they remember. Otherwise, it might seem as if they are lying.

ACTIONS INVESTIGATED

The investigation is often the most distressing part for an officer.

“You definitely feel like you’re under the microscope, and it’s a big microscope,” DeAlba said. “It’s difficult to be in that situation where you feel like, ‘I just went out and did my job.’ … All the training that I’ve had, I did what I felt was necessary at the time, but it doesn’t matter, you still get scrutinized heavily. It’s for a good reason, but it doesn’t change the fact that’s it hard.”

After a shooting, the officer is removed from the scene and accompanied back to the police department by another officer who stays with him to ensure he does not talk about the incident to anyone.

“You get read your rights, and that’s a sobering experience,” Anderson, the SVU detective, said.

The officer is ordered not to talk to people about the shooting outside of what is required for the investigation. He or she is given a minimum of three days’ paid administrative leave and must be cleared by a psychologist before returning to work.

“The first day back to work, I went back to the scene and made peace with the scene,” Carroll said. “It’s what worked for me; that way you are not reliving it over and over again.”

“After the fact, you are mad at the person for putting you in that situation, not just for threatening your life but for making you do that to them,” he said.

None of the officers interviewed said their shooting defines them or changed them in any significant way. Over time, the events replay in their minds with less frequency.

They said it was not something they took lightly, which they felt was sometimes a misconception by the public.

“I’ve never met a police officer who woke up in the morning hoping that something like this happens to them, and I hope it never happens to me again,” Anderson said. “It makes me sad that people think that of us. It’s simply not the case.”

He said often people have a “Hollywood perception” that the officer should have been able to kick the knife out of the suspect’s hand or shoot him in the arm to get him to drop the gun. But officers are trained to stop the threat, and the threshold at which an officer perceives a threat is different for each.

“People just need to realize that police officers are human and there’s a lot more to these things than what you see on TV. When these things happen, people need to take a step back, because when they rush to judgment, sometimes it’s not fair to the officer who responded (according) to the training they were given,” DeAlba said.

This story was originally published May 16, 2015 at 3:55 PM with the headline "Behind the barrel: A police perspective of officer-involved shootings."