Protestors take to the streets of Akron demanding justice for Jayland Walker who was shot to death in a hail of bullets by 8 Akron police officers after a car chase June 27.
John Kuntz | cleveland.com (TNS)
CLEVELAND – The investigation into whether Akron police officers were justified in shooting Jayland Walker could hinge on whether the officers had reason to believe that he was reaching for a gun as they chased him, police experts say.
Two national experts raised questions, however, over the dozens of times eight officers fired at Walker, 25, who was unarmed when he died June 27. His death has prompted daily protests and focused national attention on the city and its department.
Samuel Walker, a criminal justice professor at the University of Nebraska, and Andrew Scott, a former police chief of Boca Raton, Florida, viewed the videos of the chase and shooting of Jayland Walker, who did not have a gun when he ran from the car.
“An unarmed person running away is not an immediate threat to anybody’s life,” Samuel Walker said. “The question is, did the officers have some reason to believe that he was in fact reaching for a gun? That’s a serious question that needs to be investigated thoroughly by an independent agency.”
Scott said officers do not have a duty to wait to see a gun “when the totality of circumstances indicates that the suspect maybe armed, and they perceive the suspect would use the firearm against them or others. You have to put yourself in the officers’ shoes seconds before the shooting starts.”
Each of the men, however, were in disbelief over the number of bullets that struck Jayland Walker’s body.
Samuel Walker, the Nebraska professor, said that body camera videos of the shooting “speak volumes about officer over-reaction and overuse of firearms.”
“Having that many officers firing at one person, that’s reckless and that endangers other people,” Samuel Walker said. “If the shooting is justified by the facts, you don’t need to fire 60, or 30, or even 20 shots. The continued shooting is utterly without justification.”
The decision over whether the officers, whose names Akron police have not released, were justified in the shooting rests with the Bureau of Criminal Investigation, which is under the office of Attorney General Dave Yost. He said the investigation will take time but pledged to be thorough and fair.
Akron police officials have not said how many shots the officers fired.
Initial autopsy photographs, which cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reviewed at the office of Summit County Medical Examiner last week, show that investigators marked 68 wounds to Jayland Walker’s head, body and limbs as evidence and pulled 28 bullet fragments out of his body. It is unclear, however, whether all of the wounds were from entering or exiting his body.
Jayland Walker’s hands were cuffed behind his back, and several tourniquets were wrapped his body when a representative from the medical examiner’s office got to the scene, the photos and the initial autopsy report show.
The body camera videos, portions of which Akron police released on July 3, show that police said they tried to pull Jayland Walker over for a traffic and equipment violation about 12:30 a.m., and he refused to stop and officers chased him.
About 40 seconds into the chase, an officer reported hearing a gunshot come from the car, and an ODOT camera on Ohio 8 showed a flash from the car’s driver side as it got onto the highway, according to police.
An officer later radioed to his colleagues that “he did fire a shot out the side of the door,” according to a transcript.
The body camera videos show Jayland Walker slowed his car down, a handful of officers on foot surrounded him and pointed guns at the car. He ran out of the passenger side door, and multiple officers ran after him, screaming for him to stop.
Several more officers abandoned their cars and joined the chase, which ended after a few seconds in a parking lot near Wilbeth Road and Clairmont Avenue.
Jayland Walker turned around to face police. The department initially said that officers believed he reached toward his waistband, and eight officers opened fire over a span of seconds.
Jayland Walker fell to the ground and rolled several times as officers continued shooting. His body came to a rest and shook as bullets kept hitting his body, according to the video released by police.
One officer’s body camera video shows he fired several shots from behind and between two others.
Another officer waved his hand in the air and yelled, “cease fire” for several seconds before the others stopped firing.
After the shooting, police found a handgun on the seat of Jayland Walker’s car. The clip had been removed, according to a photograph police released.
Scott, the former police chief who now runs a consulting business on police procedures, said that police have the right to act quickly if they believe they are under threat.
Like Samuel Walker, Scott also was taken aback by the number of shots that officers fired at him.
“I can’t believe how long that they keep shooting him when he is down,” Scott said. “They have to articulate why they kept shooting once the man was on the ground.”
Samuel Walker said the videos also raise questions about the department’s policy and training on foot pursuits.
“You’ve got eight officers, was there anybody clear in control of this foot pursuit? I think that’s a serious question,” he said.
Akron police department’s policy manual posted online does not include a section on foot pursuits. Akron police spokesman Lt. Michael Miller did not return a request for comment on the department’s foot chases.
Samuel Walker said while foot chases are fluid, happen quickly and can change at any moment, a supervisor would ideally designate a few officers to chase and the others would hang back and provide backup.
Jason Fries, the CEO of the San Francisco-based 3D Forensic, a company that conducts analyses of officer-involved shootings and scenes, said the number of officers and shots fired are likely to make this investigation much more complex than a typical police shooting that involves a single officer.
Investigators will also face a monumental task in trying to determine exactly when each bullet struck Jayland Walker or match each gunshot wounds to the officer who caused it.
What’s more likely, he said, is that they will rely on autopsy to pinpoint the fatal shot or shots and focus on those.
However, he said there are a number of techniques that investigators may be able to use to help zero in on questions about what the officers may have seen.
Having 13 body camera videos from multiple vantage points could help investigators create a 3D model of the scene to show exactly where each officer was standing in relation to Jayland Walker.
Fries said his company can stabilize the shaky body camera videos so that Jayland Walker is centered the entire time to more clearly show what movements he made in the moments leading up to the gunfire.
“This investigation is going to be challenging to be done right,” he said. “Whoever ends up doing it is going to have their work cut out for them.”
