Ohio police given 'pep talk' on shooting scenarios ahead of Walmart encounter
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Version 0 of 1. The police officer who shot dead a young black man in a Walmart store in Ohio as he held an unloaded BB rifle had less than two weeks earlier received what prosecutors called a “pep talk” on how to deal aggressively with suspected gunmen. Sean Williams and his colleagues in Beavercreek, a suburb of Dayton, were shown a slideshow invoking their loved ones and the massacres at Sandy Hook, Columbine and Virginia Tech while being trained on 23-24 July on confronting “active shooter situations”. “If not you, then who?” officers were asked by the presentation, alongside a photograph of young students being led out of Sandy Hook elementary school in December 2012. A caption reminded the trainees that 20 children and five adults were killed before police arrived. Williams shot dead John Crawford III 12 days later, after a 911 caller repeatedly said that Crawford was pointing a gun at Walmart customers, including children. Surveillance footage released on Thursday showed Crawford passing shoppers with the air rifle at his side. A set of 11 slides from a presentation given to officers in the July session was made public by special prosecutor Mark Piepmeier, who presented the slides and other evidence to a grand jury in Greene County, which on Wednesday declined to indict Williams on criminal charges. Piepmeier signalled that the slides may have been important to the decision. “A question I have, and I think a jury would have, is how are the officers trained to deal with a situation like that,” he told reporters. He described the presentation as “almost like a pep talk for police officers,” which informed them: “You have to go after these things, you can’t ignore them”. They were told to rid themselves of the mindset that “it’s a bad day to be a cop” when confronting people who “have used, are using or are threatening to use a weapon to inflict deadly force on others”. “We should be saying ‘This is the day I took my oath, trained and prepared for my entire career,’” said one of the slides, which were prepared by the Ohio police officer training association and based on FBI protocol, according to Piepmeier. Another slide told officers to consider that such an “active threat” was “in a building with the person I love the most” and then decide whether they would want police to wait outside for backup or “enter the building and find the threat as fast as possible”. The police were taught to keep in mind that “the suspect wants a body count” and therefore officers should immediately engage a would-be gunman with “speed, surprise and aggressiveness” to prevent them from inflicting injuries or deaths. Piepmeier explained that prior to 1999, police were trained to secure and evacuate the scene of a potential shooting and then wait for a Swat team. But this changed after the massacre at Columbine high school, in Colorado, in April that year. First, small groups of officers began entering shooting scenes and searching for the suspect. “The FBI realised that wasn’t working, because in that five or 10 minutes they were waiting for people to arrive, people were dying,” he said. Since 2008, officers have been trained to enter the scene even if they arrive alone, said Piepmeier. They are told that the average incident involving a “terroristic threat or an active shooter” will last three to four minutes and “every 15 seconds, someone is going to be shot”. Crawford was shot by Williams just under five minutes after the 911 call from Ronald Ritchie, who was standing 100ft away, connected with the dispatcher. Piepmeier said that one officer called back to confirm that Crawford was reported to be pointing the air rifle at people. Captain Eric Grile, a spokesman for Beavercreek police, confirmed on Thursday that Williams was among the officers who attended the training. Piepmeier stressed that they were reminded that they were justified in using deadly force to defend himself or others “from what is reasonably believed to be an imminent threat of serious physical harm or death”. “And that was, really, the question for this jury,” said the special prosecutor. “Looking at everything, was the officer reasonable in thinking that either himself or someone else was going to receive death or serious bodily harm”. About 80 seconds before Crawford was shot dead by the police officer, Ritchie told the dispatcher: “He just pointed it at, like, two children.” The surveillance footage shows that he in fact stood still with the rifle at his side as the children and their mother browsed further down the aisle. After another 40 seconds later, the dispatcher asked Ritchie: “You said he pointed it at a couple of kids?” Ritchie replied: “Right”. Referencing the Sandy Hook massacre, Piepmeier said: “Were the police facing such a situation here? No. Did they know that? No. They’re told ‘We’ve got a guy in here with a rifle, he’s holding the rifle, and he’s pointing it at people.’” |