It's rare for a police officer to shoot even a single civilian in the line of duty, let alone shoot someone else during another incident, and then another.
But a new investigation has found that 27 Fresno police officers were involved in repeat shootings from 2002 through 2009, and 25 of whom, according to an official with the Fresno Police Department, are still on active duty today.
Flickr photo from Divine in the Daily
Reporter Ali Winston, a contributor to California Watch, filed a California Public Records Act request and found that of these 27 officers, four were involved in at least three separate shooting incidents over the same period. One officer, Michael Palomino, was involved in four shooting incidents.
During the same period, Winston writes, the similarly sized Oakland Police Department had only five officers involved in repeat shootings, although Fresno enjoys a much lower crime rate. Winston reported:
The Fresno Police Department's use of force record displays a pattern of violence that has drawn the attention of the federal Department of Justice. The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Sacramento office confirmed that it has opened an investigation into the beating of an unarmed homeless man, Glen Beaty, by two Fresno officers in February 2009.
Just eight months later, in October 2009, one of the officers involved, Scott Payn, fatally shot John Cooper, an emotionally disturbed man who was waving a toy gun. (Fresno Police only have a handful of officers who are trained to deal with the mentally ill, even though people with suicidal tendencies or 'health' issues were the fourth-highest cause of use of force incidents in 2009.)
That incident was caught on video and widely broadcast, sparking public outrage and hastening Mayor Ashley Swearingen's decision to create an independent police auditor to monitor the department. The first of these, Eddie Aubrey, was appointed in November 2009. Until then, Fresno was the only one of California's five largest cities without some form of independent police oversight.
Winston's report - a joint project of The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute - examined the impact of the sweeping Copley Press v. Superior Court, ruling by the California Supreme Court in August 2006. Winston's report found that the ruling "has blocked the public from knowing whether local police officers have engaged in misconduct, or a pattern of misconduct, even when such misconduct involves officers inappropriately shooting civilians."
Of the Fresno police officers, Winston wrote: "Neither family members of the shooting victims nor the public at large are able to access Internal Affairs investigation records or find out why 25 these officers remain on active duty. Even a victim’s family member who files a formal complaint with the FPD is only entitled to be informed about whether Internal Affairs sustained that complaint, but not whether the department undertook any related disciplinary action."
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