Two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s deputies patrolling in Compton on May 24, 2009, noticed 34-year-old Daniel Martinez acting suspiciously while standing with another man near a restaurant. Believing that Martinez might be operating as a lookout for a robbery, deputies stopped their patrol car, got out and approached, ordering Martinez to keep his hands where they could be seen. Instead, Martinez fled, holding his back pocket with one hand as he ran, according to county documents related to the incident.
As Martinez ran, he appeared to be pulling something from his pants while turning toward the two deputies, the Los Angeles Times reported. Fearing it was a handgun, both deputies fired, hitting Martinez and leaving him partially paralyzed. Deputies searched but found no weapon. All that Martinez had on him was a wallet that he was probably trying to keep from falling out of his sagging pants. Martinez sued the department, ultimately winning a $2.2-million out-of-court settlement in August 2010.
That type of incident — known as a “waistband” shooting, so named because suspects appear to be reaching for weapons in pockets or waistbands, or a “state-of-mind” shooting, referring to the level of danger that an officer perceives at the time of such an incident — is part of a rising trend among sheriff’s deputies, according to a report released last Thursday by a watchdog group commissioned by the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to monitor the Sheriff’s Department.
According to that report, researched and complied by the Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC), an independent nonprofit organization that has been monitoring Sheriff’s Department operations twice a year since 1996, all but two of the 15 people shot in waistband incidents in 2010 were either Latino or African American. There were 10 similar shootings — including the one involving Martinez — in 2009.
“That was a 50 percent increase, true. However, [the number] only went up by five,” Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Whitmore told CBS TV reporters last Friday. Whitmore did not return several calls from the Weekly seeking comment on this story. “Now, one is too many, but there’s a difference between the increase in numbers when it’s magnified in percentages,” Whitmore said.
But those aren’t the only troubling numbers in the report concerning minorities. PARC Special Counsel Merrick Bobb and
his team of investigators found that since 1996, 61 percent of deputy-involved shootings involved Latino suspects and 29 percent involved African Americans, while white suspects were only fired upon 10 percent of the time.
“It’s a serious problem. Latino males get profiled all the time,” said Randy Jurado Ertll, executive director of Pasadena-based El Centro de Accion de Social.
“If they shave their heads, people automatically assume they are gang members. If they drive a certain car that is known to be driven by gangbangers, or wear loose clothing or T-shirts, people automatically assume they are a gangbanger,” Ertll said. “There are a lot of shootings against Latino males that go unreported in the media because the perception is they deserve it. These are poor people who don’t have high-priced attorneys. This report sheds some serious light on this issue.”
Pasadena NAACP Branch President Joe Brown said he was disturbed by the statistics and said deputies may be confused by the styles of clothing worn by teenagers and young adults. In many cases, it seems, the shooting victim tried to hold up his oversized pants while running from police.
“A lot of our young men are wearing their pants well below their waists,” Brown noted. “Many times they would rather hold onto their pants or cell phones as they run. Officers at that point think that it is a weapon, and, all too frequently, people have lost their lives in the miscommunication. We have implored Pasadena police officers to take a second look before firing.”
A subtext contained in the report suggests that sheriff’s officials were deeply concerned about the way the statistics contained in Bobb’s report would be perceived by the media and the community.
“Your staff worries that the media will quote from our report by taking statements out of context to make them appear more damning or provocative,” states a letter from Bobb to Sheriff Lee Baca, which appears at the beginning of the report. “They urge us, therefore, to purge our report of any statement that may be seen as critical or damning if taken out of context.
We can empathize with the LASD in that the media have not always accurately reflected our findings. But it is impossible to write a 100-[plus] page report in such a way as to eliminate the possibility of media distortion of any statement in or out of context. The LASD’s beef should be directed more at the media than at the messenger.”
Bobb also did not return phone calls seeking comment for this story.
Usually, deputy shooting rates in Los Angeles keep pace with homicide rates, but over the past two years officer-involved shootings increased while the homicide rate fell, according to the report. Despite the high number of incidents involving minorities, Bobb was careful to point out that the study does not imply deputies are intentionally shooting at unarmed minorities.
“What troubles us is that an African- American or Latino youth is more likely to be the subject of a mistaken perception of dangerousness than is a white or Asian person,” the study states. “Does this necessarily imply bias? We take great pains in our report not to make that inferential leap.”
Whitmore, speaking with the Times, said the incidents occurred in predominately minority neighborhoods in which gang activity
is intense.
The report does not list any incidents occurring at the Altadena or Crescenta Valley stations, but it does express concern over the sheriff’s Century substation, which patrols Lynwood, Firestone, Athens Park and Florence. Deputies working there were responsible for more than 25 percent of all of the department’s shootings. Yet only 8 percent of the department’s sworn personnel work at that station.
The report found that more than half of off-duty shootings involved officers with less than three years on the job. The report also found that about one-third of officers involved in an off-duty shooting had not attended tactical firearms training within the past two years, and that the unit responsible for the training is currently training less than one-third of patrol officers every year.
Bobb had other major complaints with the department, one of them regarding the unethical and sometimes criminal behavior of some deputies, and called on Baca to initiate sting operations to catch deputies gone bad.
The report also lashed out at the department for its shoddy bookkeeping on shooting incidents, stating that “It was with great dismay that we discovered that much of the data collected by the department with regard to shootings is missing, inaccurate, lost, or lacking in basic internal integrity.” Further, the report states, “We also encountered needless compartmentalization of information, confusion about tracking systems and data entry, and an apparent failure on the part of LASD management to audit its own data collection systems or to analyze the data contained therein.”
‘Waistband’ shootings by the Numbers:
• “Waistband,” or “state-of-mind” shootings, in which a deputy must make a split-second decision on whether to use deadly force, rose by 50 percent in the past year.
• Over the past six years, approximately 61 percent of all state-of-mind shooting suspects were confirmed to be unarmed at the time of the shooting.
•In the last six years, seven deputies have been shot, seven have been hit by motor vehicles and 27 have been fired upon. No fatalities were reported.
• Latinos and black men between the ages of 18 and 25 comprised 96 percent of those shot in such incidents.
• Since 1996, 178 persons have been shot and killed by sheriff’s personnel; an additional 204 were wounded. One-fifth of all suspects hit over the past six years were unarmed — in 2010, the rate was more than one-third.
• More than half of off-duty shootings involved officers with less than three years on the job, indicating that inexperience or a lack of training may be associated with such incidents.
• About one-third of officers involved in an off-duty shooting had not attended tactical firearms training within the past two years, and the unit responsible for the training is currently training less than one-third of patrol officers every year.
• African-American and Latino suspects were on average 25 years old. White suspects, in comparison, averaged about 35 years old.
• State-of-mind shootings make up about one-third of all hit and non-hit shooting cases in 2010. In the past, this type of shooting generally constituted about one-fifth.
— Source: Police Assessment Resource Center (PARC)
