Three Years After An Officer Killed A Suicidal Teen, Law Enforcement Releases Report That Raises More Questions
from the everyone-is-innocent-but-the-dead-kid dept
Law enforcement seems to assume that any shooting officers engage in is justified. What may appear to be reckless violence by cops is just good police work, according to police. Anyone who thinks otherwise is only expressing their ignorance of police tactics and far too unconcerned about officer safety.
Public outcry following police shootings is often greeted with statements from police officials asking the public to calm down until all the facts are in. Then law enforcement officials set about burying facts, rewriting narratives, and doing everything they can to put some time and distance between them and the shooting.
A recently released report on the 2018 killing of Kansas teen John Albers appears to be thorough, at least at first glance. It's 498 pages long, suggesting it's a thorough documentation of the shooting of Albers by Overland Park police officer Clayton Jennison. Like far too many fatal shootings, it started with a call from someone concerned about the teen's welfare.
This is from early reporting on the 2018 shooting.
Police had been told Albers, a junior at Blue Valley Northwest, had been taking pills and drinking heavily and had, via a FaceTime phone call, told someone he was going to stab himself. At least one of the responding officers was familiar with Albers, according to police radio traffic.
Here's how it was described to reporters after Albers had been killed by Officer Jennison.
As officers approached the house in the 9300 block of W. 149th Terrace, the garage door opened and a vehicle came out moving “rapidly” toward one of the officers, with Albers at the wheel, according to police. The officer shot Albers, killing him. No officers were injured.
[...]
After the shooting, the vehicle — a Honda minivan — ended up in a front yard across the street, according to neighbors. It appeared to have come out of the driveway facing forward.
The dashcam video shows otherwise. The van came out of the garage in reverse and did not move "rapidly" towards the officer. Instead, it headed straight down the driveway next to Officer Jenison, who began shooting as it began moving past him. The van then swings back in a half-circle back onto the lawn, suggesting Albers has already been hit. Then it heads across the street before coming to a stop on the neighbor's lawn.
And there's this final insult to the public's intelligence:
Police have not said that Albers had a weapon other than the vehicle.
If Officer Jennison was in any danger of being run over, it's because he put himself in that position. He moved towards the van as it exited the garage and opened fire when it moved past him. His shooting of Albers resulted in the unpredictable vehicle movements that followed his initial shots. No other officer on the scene fired their weapon.
Shortly after the shooting, Police Chief Frank Donchez asked for patience. More than three years after he asked for that, the report has finally arrived. The Kansas City Star turned the report [PDF] over to a handful of experts, none of whom seem impressed by the report or its findings.
In the days after the material was released, The Star had it examined by two forensic scientists, a criminal justice professor and Paul Morrison, the former Johnson County District Attorney.
All found the investigation lacked neutrality and was missing crucial information.
“Everyone just seemed to know what had happened, and had concluded already what had happened,” said Charles Wellford, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Maryland with an extensive background reviewing homicide cases.
“There were things they could have done if they were not convinced from the get-go that this was not a chargeable action.”
“A substantial amount of that report didn’t really even deal with the shooting,” Morrison said. “It dealt with John Albers and his juvenile problems. And that, in my mind, is usually a sign that maybe somebody’s not the most neutral.”
To make room for the disparagement of the dead teen, the investigators excluded crucial information from the report, like the initial supervisor's notes from the shooting scene and any attempts made by the crime lab to reconstruct the shootings and track bullet trajectories. The latter would have shown Jenison fired from the side of the vehicle, rather than from the rear, calling into question his assertions that the reversing van was coming towards him.
Officer Jenison also did not know who was in the van at the point he started firing. All he knew was he was checking on a suicidal teen who might have been carrying a knife. Instead of verifying any of this, he opened fire on the driver of the van simply because he chose to reverse down the driveway like anyone would when pulling out of a garage.
Jenison's post-shooting interview was solicitous and cordial. It also occurred four days after the shooting and after the officer had been given the chance to review the recordings. His claims that he thought the van was going to hit him went unchallenged, even though the recording showed the van moving in a straight line down the driveway until its course was altered by Jenison's shooting of the driver.
The report gives the impression the conclusion that the shooting was justified was reached before the investigation truly began, allowing investigators to work their way backwards from this supposition. The multi-agency investigation only involved other law enforcement agencies, lowering the chance of any other conclusion being reached.
As we've seen in other cases where shootings by officers are investigated, cops are handled very differently than anyone else who's killed anyone, even in supposed self-defense. Officers are given hours, if not days, to review materials and prepare for questioning. All rights are immediately respected, rather than having to be invoked repeatedly by the officer being questioned. They are almost never arrested or jailed, even if probable cause exists to do so. And when cops investigate other cops, they wholeheartedly embrace the ideal of "innocent until proven guilty" in a way they never do when dealing with detained criminal suspects.
Years later, this is the sort of thing that gets handed to the public: a largely exonerative compilation of foregone conclusions spiced up with some details of the shooting victim's prior run-ins with law enforcement. It ignores the victim's mental health crisis for the most part, highlighting it only when it serves to portray John Albers as dangerous to others. And it fully ignores the inconvenient fact that Officer Jenison did not actually know who was in the van when he started shooting, making the details about Albers' past troubles completely irrelevant.
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Filed Under: john albers, police, police shooting
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Well...
When you train them to be a hammer, everyone looks like a nail. Especially those that look different.
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And if you train an officer to be a soldier, everyone else looks like a threat — even when they aren’t.
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Re: Well...
When your hammer is police brutality, everyone becomes a thumb.
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"Oh no! John said he's going to commit suicide, what shall we do?"
"What? Suicide! Has he ever said something like that before? Is he feeling depressed? How seriously should we take his threat?"
"This is no time for careful deliberation! Call the cops now!"
"Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Are we sure about calling the cops?"
"Sure I'm sure! Haven't we seen from innumerable video evidence that cops are trained for these kinds of situations? They are trained to talk gently to suicidal people, de-escalate situations, calm things down. What do you think is going to happen; that the cop will just shoot him in the face?"
"Yeah, I guess so. Call the cops!"
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Re:
Soldiers are taught Rules of Engagement, and know the Courts-martial of the UCMJ are very happy to chew up any offenders.
Neither of these applies to police.
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Yet another whitewash of what appears to be a premeditated murder by cop.
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Re: Re: Well...
So what you guys are saying, is that it's Hammer TIme?
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I think you mean "white male officer safety".
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20210512/20593546786/violent-bigoted-cop-accused-bea ting-another-cop-is-upset-his-text-messages-expose-him-as-violent-bigot.shtml
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Re:
Correction: If you train an officer to think that policing is like fighting a war, everyone else looks like a threat.
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Where's the indictment?
It would appear there's sufficient evidence to support an indictment of the officer, at the very least for manslaughter. Was the delay in the release of the report sufficient to allow the statute of limitations to expire?
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Re: Re:
Spot on. The police should be more like the military: rules of engagement as restrictive as those we give soldiers in counter-insurgency theaters, consequences as serious as those applied to soldiers or marines who kill non-combatants by breaching those rules of engagement. That and no right to unionize. Those can be applied by legislation.
We also need a cultural shift to regard discharge for cause from a police force as a blot as black as a dishonorable discharge from the military.
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Re:
He want to kill himself?
Not on my watch.
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Title Correction
He did not kill the teen.
He went out of his way and executed the teen.
Call it what it is.
It was an execution.
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Re:
"And if you train an officer to be a soldier, everyone else looks like a threat — even when they aren’t."
If officers were trained to be soldiers it'd be a lot better. Soldiers spend a lot of time peacekeeping in hostile areas while managing not to shoot a lot of civilians.
There are about a ton of youtube videos of servicemen and veterans critiquing law enforcement deployment of riots. The verdict is always, invariably, that the police are pulling every don't in the military's book of de-escalation and moving among potential hostiles.
Soldiers get taught a sense of proportion and a way to NOT escalate hostilities. The police get taught to fire before a threat can even manifest. Cops are literally taught instinctive murder in their "warrior training".
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Re: Re:
Another big difference is that soldiers dont have politically powerful unions covering their collective corrupt asses like the police does. Aside I wonder why soldiers dont have unions. Not able to create them?
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Need some clearity
Which types of issues are raising? Any Example, please.
https://www.williamjacket.com/
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Did anyone actually watch the video?
The situation is quit clear.
Van begins to slowly back out of garage.
Police official yells stop.
Drives sees police officer and accelerates rapidly in reverse. Officer fires at the fleeing vehicle.
How is this not a justifiable shooting?!!!!?
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Re:
You have a teen that's mentally in a bad spot and that has been drinking and taking pills, how do you think he will react when someone points a gun at him? Not rationally anyway.
So the teen panicked, stepped on the gas and lost control of the vehicle. I've seen stressed people do the same mistake when reversing and thinking they are stepping on the break but in actuality they are stepping on the accelerator.
The whole point of going on a call dealing with someone who has threatened to hurt themselves is not to kill them. The problem is that the police have been trained to react with violence to almost any situation they encounter.
If this had concerned a hardened criminal I might have agreed with you depending on the circumstances, but what we had here was a drunk teen with mental problems that got killed by the police instead of getting the help he needed.
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Re: Re:
True. But this is what we have police are trained to enforce law. They shouldn’t be the the ones sent for welfare checks. You dispatch fire and rescue for such situations. Not police.
He responded to a deadly threat with deadly force
This is a systematic problem of bad dispatching for calls such as these.
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Re: Re: Re:
Correction this is not what
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