The Portland Police Bureau this afternoon identified eight Central Precinct officers involved in the shooting Monday of Marcus Lagozzino, a mentally ill man wielding a machete outside his parents’ Southwest Portland home.
The shooting—which also included so-called “less-lethal” weapons like a Taser and beanbag shotguns—came less than a minute after officers first made contact with Lagozzino and just more than 20 minutes after his mother called 911 to warn that her 34-year-old son was threatening “suicide by cop.”
Police officials previously declined to specify how many times Lagozzino was shot. But today spokesman Sgt. Pete Simpson said in a release that he was hit at least three times. Officer Bradley Clark, a four-year veteran, fired his AR-15 rifle four times. He has been placed on paid leave until a Multnomah County grand jury weighs the case, a process expected to begin next week.
Simpson says Lagozzino is recovering from gunshot wounds to his chest; the Oregonian is reporting Lagozzino’s condition has been upgraded from critical to serious.
Police officials also said that officers Ralph Elwood and Scott Foster, with 14 and 17 years in the bureau respectively, fired a total of seven beanbag rounds. And Officer Jamin Becker, with the bureau just two years, also Tasered Lagozzino once.
The bureau also identified the supervising sergeant, David Michaelson, and the three officers providing cover as the shooting unfolded, Sergeant Rick Stainbrook, Curtis Pak, and Daniel Spiegel.
The police shooting in Portland is the sixth this year—all of them involving men dealing with mental illness and/or addiction issues—and the third within a four-week span that began in late November. If Lagozzino survives, he’ll be the only one of this year’s shooting victims to do so. One of the other five, Craig Boehler, was ruled to have died of smoke inhalation after a fire erupted during a shootout at his mother’s home.
From the accounts I’ve heard from sources who seem less likely to have a point of view, the cops didn’t have time to reason with him, had exhausted the less lethal means, and were being approached by someone who probably WANTED to be shot and was engaging in behavior he knew would provoke a shooting. It escapes me what people think the other outcome might have been.
If you want the real culprit, I suppose it’s the Supreme Court which has made it night on impossible to keep people in a facility for their own protection and the safety of others. While mental health advocates are quick to say that schizophrenics aren’t dangerous, in fact some of them really are, to others as well as themselves. In Australia it was found that 4 of 5 female murderers and 1out of 3 male murders had serious mental illness in their backgrounds. Serious mental illness usually means schizophrenia.
“Men with schizophrenia were found to be eight times more likely to kill, and women with schizophrenia 29 times more likely to kill, than non-sufferers.” There’s no reason to believe that Americans differ from Australians in this regard.
Read more…
http://www.theage.com.au/national/mental-i…