“It’s confusing. It sends a symbolic and inhumane message despite the process involved,” DiCello said, adding that the incident raises a critical question about the degree of compassion when officers decide to handcuff someone who has been shot dozens of times. . “If no one thought they should be handcuffed, then why not just out of respect for the loss of human life, avoid it?” DiCello added. It’s common practice across the country to handcuff a person deemed dangerous and armed — even after being shot by police — so the person can’t access weapons or pose another threat, three law enforcement experts told CNN. law. The choice to handcuff someone who has just been shot by police “is not a question of humane or inhumane,” said Maria Haberfeld, a professor of police science at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Beyond an injured suspect, the broader circumstances of the situation can “affect (officers’) threat perception,” he said, adding that someone who is already clinically dead can show movement, suggesting 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 fired at you,” Haberfeld said, speaking generally of police encounters with suspects who believed to be armed. Details of Walker’s case continue to emerge amid public scrutiny of how law enforcement personnel across the United States use force, especially against people of color. Walker was black, while seven of the eight officers who fired at him are white and one is black, the city said. All have been placed on paid administrative leave, per service policy.
Officers are told not to breach the body
Each police department has policies that dictate when officers should use deadly force, usually when a weapon is involved and a suspect poses an immediate threat to officers and the public, experts told CNN. But there is no national standard for restraining 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 they don’t address how officers should use restraints beyond guidelines for arrest screening and officer safety. Police say Walker fled as 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 shot out the window. The pursuit then briefly turned into a foot chase in which police shot and killed Walker after he stopped quickly and believed he was reaching his waist and “felt that Mr. Walker had turned and was gesturing and moving in firing position,” officials. they have said. While a gun was found in his car after the shooting, Walker was unarmed when he was killed, Akron Police Chief Stephen Mylett said at a July 3 news conference when police released extensive body camera footage of 13 officers to the point. If the officers had not handcuffed Walker as they approached him — after they believed he had fired a gun at them from his vehicle — he would have been “surprised” by Thor Eels, the executive director of the National Association of Tactical Officers said. Even after that, “unless the medical professionals asked to remove the handcuffs so they could do some kind of advanced life support that would require it, the officers would not remove them,” he said. If a person is found dead at the scene after a police shooting, officers are typically advised not to tamper with the case by touching the body — including removing handcuffs — so it can be turned over to the medical examiner’s office as part of the shooting investigation, said the Eels, a former commander in the Colorado Springs Police Department. “Once they determine that this is now an officer-involved shooting, most agencies are taught not to touch or disturb anything,” he said. “It all comes down to the angle that has the legal responsibility to evaluate all of this as a whole. (The medical examiner asks) questions like, ‘Did anything potentially contribute to or aggravate some kind of injuries or otherwise?’”
“It’s 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 make threats, Mylett told Cleveland affiliate WEWS. All restrictions remain to preserve the crime scene, the chief said. But the chief admitted 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,” Mylett told WEWS. “I get it, I really do. And I’ll have a conversation with others about the need for it.” The Akron Police Department, the city and the police union have not responded to CNN’s repeated requests for comment on the practice of restraining suspects, including those who have been shot by officers. In many cases like this, officers are “just following the rules of their department,” but those guidelines may be outdated, said Chuck Wexler, executive director of the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research and policy organization. “Those procedures were put in place a long time ago and I think it’s time to review those policies in situations where it’s clear someone is seriously injured and first aid is needed,” he said. In Walker’s case, the Summit County Coroner’s Office’s preliminary report contains several pages of photo thumbnails showing the young man dead and handcuffed at the scene and after his body arrived at the medical examiner’s office. A final autopsy report will be turned over to the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which investigates any criminal wrongdoing by the officers, and will be part of what the state attorney general’s office considers in presenting a case to a grand jury.
