It should be easy to tell fatal shotgun rounds from the “less-lethal” (though still incredibly painful) beanbag rounds cops use to incapacitate arrestees. The “live” round shells are bright red. The beanbags’ shells are described as a “milky white.”

But as Portland City Council this morning OKd a hefty settlement to a young man mistakenly shot with live ammo, Commissioner Amanda Fritz posed an interesting question: Does Portland test its officers for color blindness?

“I think we should be looking at every single factor,” Fritz said.

Deputy City Attorney Jim Rice said he’d check into the matter. Portland Police Spokesman Pete Simpson wasn’t immediately sure. Turns out: Police recruits are tested before employment, and disqualified if they’re found to be color blind.

So the condition played no part in the dangerous errors of Officer Dane Reister— who in June 2011 mistakenly believed he was firing beanbag rounds at William Kyle Monroe, a man suffering a manic incident in a Portland park.

The difference between a red shotgun shell and a whitish-gray shotgun shell, in this instance, cost the city a great deal of embarrassment and a record amount of settlement money. Council this morning approved spending $965,000, the city’s portion of the $2.3 million settlement Monroe will receive. The rest of that money will be paid through insurance.

“This had never occurred before,” said Rice, who searched around for examples of similar mix-ups nationally. “I think it was a first-time instance.”

The city has already taken lessons from the incident. It now prohibits officers from carrying both live and less-lethal rounds on their person, Rice said. Reister, who fired at Monroe five times causing permanent injury, faces possible criminal conviction in the case, and is on paid leave.

I'm a news reporter for the Mercury. I've spent a lot of the last decade in journalism — covering tragedy and chicanery in the hills of southwest Missouri, politics in Washington, D.C., and other matters...

7 replies on “Nope, the City’s Embarrassing $2.3 Million Payout Can’t be Explained by Color Blindness”

  1. Color blindness that means you can’t tell the difference between red and green is quite common (over 10% of men, far less common in women).

    Color blindness that means you can’t tell the difference between blue and yellow is much rarer, but does happen.

    Color blindness that means you can’t tell the difference between red and white doesn’t exist.

  3. I’m starting to wonder why cities have to make all these payouts. The guy who effed up, sure, let’s hang him out to dry, he deserves it. But unless there was some reason to think he was going to eff up, why is the is the city to blame? If he passed all our tests and had a good record and we couldn’t have predicted that he was a nutbag, why do all the citizens have to pony up for the settlement? What did we do wrong?

  4. @Reymont and if we are all on the hook for their errors while (more or less) working in service of the city and us they should STFU when we want more citizen oversight and review.

  5. free bit of advice… buy different gauge shot guns for your bean bag guns, the problem will never happen again…

  6. Is there another job in the world you get to keep after making a mistake that costs your employer somewhere in the range of 10-20x your annual salary?

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