The police decision to handcuff Walker after he was shot was “an added insult to a terrible loss,” Walker’s family attorney Bobby DiCello told CNN on Saturday. Walker’s family “can’t fathom these so-called safety reasons when they know Jayland suffered so many injuries and lethal force.”
“It’s confusing. It sends a symbolic and dehumanizing message despite the procedure that’s involved,” DiCello said, adding that the incident raises a critical question about how much compassion comes into play when police officers decide to handcuff someone who has been shot dozens of times. .
“If no one thought he should be handcuffed, then why not simply out of respect for the loss of human life avoid it?” DiCello added.
It’s common practice across the country to handcuff a person believed to be dangerous and armed — even after being shot by police — so the person can’t access a weapon or pose another threat, three law enforcement experts told CNN.
The choice to handcuff someone who has just been shot by police is not “a question of humanity or inhumanity,” said Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Besides an injured suspect, the broader circumstances of the situation can “affect (officers’) threat perception,” she said, adding that someone who is already clinically dead can show movement that suggests they are still alive and dangerous.
“That’s the way they think, that’s the way they’re trained — that you can never underestimate the threat level of someone who has previously shot at you,” Haberfeld said, speaking generally about police encounters with suspects believed to be armed.
Details of Walker’s case continue to emerge amid public scrutiny of how law enforcement officers in the United States use force, particularly against people of color. Walker was black, while seven of the eight officers who shot him were white and one was black, the city said. All have been placed on paid administrative leave per department policy.
Officers were told not to tamper with the body
Each police department has policies dictating when officers should use deadly force, usually when a weapon is involved and the suspect poses an immediate threat to officers and the public, experts told CNN.
But there is no national standard for detaining a person after being shot, they said. Most agencies train officers to immediately handcuff a suspect so they can secure any weapons and assess injuries to render aid, but do not go into how officers should use restraints outside of arrest control and officer safety guidelines .
Police say Walker fled when officers tried to pull him over for traffic and equipment violations, and during an 18-minute car chase, he fired what appeared to be a gunshot out the window. The pursuit then briefly devolved into a chase during which police shot Walker after he quickly stopped and they believed he was reaching for his waist and “felt Mr. Walker turn and wave and move into firing position,” officials said.
Although a gun was found in his car after the shooting, Walker was unarmed when he was killed, Akron Police Chief Stephen Millett said at a July 3 news conference as police released lengthy body camera footage of 13 officers at the crime scene.
If the officers had not handcuffed Walker when they approached him – because they believed he had fired a weapon at them from his vehicle – it would have “surprised” Thor Eales, said the executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association.
Even then, “unless medical professionals request that the handcuffs be removed so they can do some advanced life support that would require it, officers will not remove them,” he said.
If a person is pronounced dead at a crime scene after a police shooting, officers are generally advised not to tamper with the casket by touching the body — including removing handcuffs — so it can be turned over to the medical examiner’s office as part of a shooting investigation, said Eales, a former commander with the Colorado Springs Police Department.
“Once they determine it’s already an officer-involved shooting with a fatality, most agencies are taught not to touch or disturb anything,” he said. “Everything is left as it is for the angler who has the legal responsibility to evaluate all of this in its totality.” (The coroner asks) questions like, ‘Did anything potentially contribute to or aggravate some kind of injury or otherwise?'”
“It is time to review these policies,” says the expert
Akron Police Department policy requires officers to handcuff a suspect after all officer-involved shootings because the suspect may continue to pose a threat, Mylett told Cleveland affiliate WEWS. All restraints are in place to preserve the crime scene, the chief said.
But the chief acknowledged the policy needs to be reviewed.
“If that was my brother, if that was my son, if that was my grandson, I wouldn’t like that,” Maillett told WEWS. “I understand that, I really do. And I will have a conversation with others about the need for it.”
The Akron Police Department, the city and the police union did not respond to repeated requests from CNN for comment on the practice of detaining suspects, including those who have been shot by officers.
In many cases like this, officers are “just sticking to their department’s rules,” but those guidelines may be outdated, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research and policy organization.
“These procedures were put in place a long time ago and I think it’s time to review these policies in situations where it’s clear that someone has been critically injured and first aid is needed,” he said.
In Walker’s case, the Summit County Medical Examiner’s preliminary report contained several pages of thumbnail photos showing the young man dead and handcuffed at the scene and after his body arrived at the medical examiner’s office.
The final autopsy report will be turned over to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which investigates all criminal acts by the officers, and will be part of what the state attorney general’s office considers a case presentation to a grand jury.
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