Modesto policeman who killed unarmed man should lose job and face criminal charges

Modesto Police Officer Joseph Lamantia should be fired and face criminal charges for killing an unarmed man.

Lamantia has proven himself a threat to public safety, having shot five people in 11 years; four died. He is a liability to the city and an embarrassment to the Modesto Police Department and officers everywhere, the majority of whom have never shot anyone and never will.

Most officers are good people who understand their roles as public guardians and public servants. They draw weapons when necessary, and pull the trigger when out of options.

Lamantia does not fit that description. His record suggests an authoritarian warrior mentality, someone who shoots first and asks questions later, someone eager to make the wall of a Modesto church his personal firing range.

“I know the community has a lot of questions, and I have a lot of questions about this,” Brandon Gillespie, interim police chief, said on the telephone Wednesday.

Yes, we have questions. And prospective answers, too.

Why did Lamantia on Dec. 29 kill an unarmed man?

Gillespie understandingly won’t talk particulars in the middle of his department’s investigation. But the dead man’s family sees the way police packaged video footage of the shooting before publicly releasing it late Tuesday as a sign of defending one of their own. The video says officers were told that Trevor Seever had acquired a gun and had posted ugly, violent threats specifically against Modesto police on social media.

But it turns out that Seever didn’t have a gun. Why did Lamantia shoot him?

Only Lamantia knows. Seever may have been trying to get away. It’s hard to tell, from the officer’s body camera footage.

Even if he was running, is that justification for killing him?

It isn’t. It never is. And it’s disturbing just how often officers kill people who aren’t confronting them and who seem to want nothing more than to be far from where they are.

This editorial board recently has condemned the killings of three other people at the hands of local officers. Two — Evin Yadegar, in 2017, and Carmen Spencer Mendez, in 2018 — were fleeing when officers chose lethal force. The officers’ parent agencies — Stanislaus County and the city of Ceres — respectively paid $7 million and $2.1 million to settle lawsuits with survivors, because neither was a “good shoot.”

The latter was paid even though Mendez had been armed with a gun just before he was shot. Seever had no weapon when Lamantia killed him outside Modesto Church of the Brethren. What are the chances that Seever’s family will sue Modesto?

Modesto officer has killed before

Has Lamantia killed other unarmed people?

Yes. In 2010, he and another Modesto police officer were under the impression that Francisco Moran had a butcher knife when they shot and killed him. It turned out he had a spatula.

Was Lamantia charged in any of the other shootings?

No. Particularly here in Stanislaus County, officers are rarely held accountable in court. District Attorney Birgit Fladager has never charged one for using lethal force on duty since her election in 2006, including the fatal shootings involving Lamantia. Deputy Justin Wall faces manslaughter charges in San Joaquin County because he killed Yadegar there after a slow-speed chase from Stanislaus.

San Joaquin authorities probably won’t charge Lamantia or three other Modesto police officers who shot a homicide suspect in a Stockton park in October. Although David Cummings Jr., too, was running from the officers when they opened fire, he was carrying the same gun reportedly used in a double-murder in Modesto four days before.

California law recently was changed to require that officers use lethal force when necessary, as opposed to reasonable.

It’s hard to predict when Fladager might decide whether to hold Lamantia to account in Seever’s death. She waited 16 months after then-Ceres Officer Ross Bays killed Mendez to decide against charging him. Her decision on Lamantia presumably will be based solely on that incident and not on his record as a trigger-happy cop.

Gillespie, however, will look at Lamantia’s entire bloody history in a decision on keeping or firing him.

It’s amazing he has lasted this long.

Few officers ever fire weapons

Only 27% of law enforcement officers discharge firearms on duty in their entire careers, the Pew Research Center reported in 2017 after the National Police Research Platform surveyed nearly 8,000 police officers across the United States.

Most law enforcement officers stop and think, as required by law and common decency, before resorting to lethal force.

Recruits study how best to approach difficult people, and other de-escalation techniques, for four hours in the pre-service academy, Gillespie said. Every other year, officers go through eight more hours of similar critical incident training meant to help them make better split-second decisions under incredible pressure.

Lamantia had a range of options available to him when Seever tried to run. The officer might have called for backup, waited for a K-9 unit, followed him for a bit. He might have tried calling to identify himself as a policeman, or tried talking to him. Any of those might be expected of a public guardian who is sworn to protect and to serve, not to hunt down and kill.

Instead, Lamantia immediately yelled “Get on the ground” twice before quickly opening fire — four shots at first, followed by “Show me your hands” commands and three more shots when Seever’s raised arm dropped, perhaps because he’d just been shot.

Of all the options open to Lamantia — who faced no threat — he chose the most extreme, the most impatient and the most deadly. And an unarmed man has paid with his life.

Lamantia should be removed from the Modesto Police Department, and he should face criminal charges.

This story was originally published January 8, 2021 at 11:31 AM.