Today the Portland Police Bureau released an audio recording (we’ll post it here shortly) of police radio correspondence in the immediate wake of the police shooting of Keaton Otis on May 12.
According to Police spokesperson Mary Wheat, Otis “pulled out a handgun and shot one of the officers. The officers returned fire and shot and killed a suspect at the scene.”
But they used a beanbag gun on Otis, a few minutes after he shot Officer Christopher Burley in the groin and officers immediately returned fire. The recordings show that Otis was still “moving” and considered a threat after the original shots-fired call went out over the radio:
Officer Christopher Burley: (1:12 elapsed time on recording) “Shots fired! I’ve been hit!“
Other officer: “Shots fired! Shots fired!”
…
Officer: (2:22) “We’re transporting the downed officer to Emanuel via police car… He’s got a gunshot wound between his legs.”
…
Officer: (3:30) “No outstanding threat, no outstanding threat. The suspect is inside the car. He’s down, he’s still moving… Why don’t we go ahead and activate SERT, we’re going to have SERT move forward and take him into custody. There’s a gun up underneath him, I believe.”Dispatch: (3:42) “Copy, activating SERT.”
…
Dispatch: (4:30) “Okay, one block west of Clackamas on Sixth, SERT staged.”
…
Officer: (5:46) “We’re going to beanbag him, we’re going to beanbag the suspect.”Officer: (6:00) “We’re going to move forward and take him into custody. We’ve beanbagged him, we’ve got no movement at this point.“
Officer: (6:15) “…please cancel SERT.”
SERT is the city’s version of a SWAT team. SERT was not called in the wake of the Aaron Campbell shooting earlier this year, which raised some questions.
Copies of the police report, as well as news from today’s Police press conference, still to come.
Update 1:19 pm: Here are the officer reports of the incident. On page 23 of this document, eyewitness Christina Lais tells an officer that after the shots, “From what I could see of the guy he looked lifeless, but they [officers] continued to yell at him.” On May 13, Lais told the Mercury that “they shot [Otis] few times with the bean bags. I think it was because they couldn’t see his hands and weren’t sure if he still had the gun.”
Firing a ban bag at someone hardly counts as “unreasonable force” if you’ve already shot him. Everything I’ve seen on this one (from any side) sounds like the cops got it right. They’ve quite rightly taken a lot of stick recently for being trigger-happy / overreacting, but not this time.
I’ve always been of the belief that even if the suspect has a gun (which many of them recently haven’t had), cops shooting them is ONLY justified if the suspect is actually using it, i.e. shooting at cops; even in the worst case scenario, preventing one dead cop doesn’t justify killing multiple suspects. In this case, he was, so it’s justified.
It’s all too easy to forget that the incidents-gone-wrong recently have tended to involve the same few cops over and over again (Humphreys…), the rest are genuinely doing a good job and getting a bad rap. If only their union would realize that and stop defending the indefensible, the public relations would be much better…
The documents censor where he was shot. Guess it wasn’t quite the “legs”.