Fresno auditor releases report on 5 officer-involved shootings. He clears them all
An independent police auditor for the city of Fresno determined that five officer-involved shootings last fall and this spring – including two in which armed suspects died from their injuries – did not violate Fresno Police Department policies.
The cases include two incidents in which the department’s internal-affairs investigation faulted officers for failing to activate their body cameras to document their encounters.
The report issued Monday afternoon by John Gliatta with the Office of Independent Review covers analyses and findings completed during the second quarter of 2021, from April 1 through June 30, although the actual cases date to September 2020.
“In each of the (shooting) cases … (the department’s Internal Affairs or IA investigators) determined the shootings were within department policy,” Gliatta stated in his report. “This office arrived at the same findings following a thorough review of the IA investigation.”
Investigations remain incomplete for three additional shooting cases that occurred earlier this year.
The five cases in which Gliatta concurred with the internal investigations include:
Sept. 19, 2020: A Fresno police officer shot and wounded a 28-year-old man who had reportedly pointed a gun at another person outside a convenience store at Belmont and Maple avenues in southeast Fresno. Gliatta said body camera footage from the first officer shows the man with what appeared to be a gun tucked into the front of his pants. A second officer fired one shot at the man after he appeared to be reaching for the gun. The gun turned out to be a realistic-looking BB-gun replica of a pistol. The second officer was found to have failed to turn on his body camera.
Oct. 2, 2020: An officer shot and killed a 46-year-old man who charged at him with a knife in front of a home near Helm and Townsend avenues in southeast Fresno. Multiple officers were dispatched to the home following a 911 call for a family disturbance. As police negotiated with the man, his brother tried to tackle him and was stabbed in the chest.
Officers fired several “less-lethal” bean-bag rounds from a shotgun and used a Taser to try to subdue the man, who continued to wield the knife. One officer fired several rounds from his handgun as the man ran toward him with the knife, fatally wounding the man. “When the subject ran directly at (the officer) while still holding the knife, and refused his commands to stop, the use of deadly force was the only option,” Gliatta wrote in his report.
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Oct. 17, 2020: A 22-year-old man who called 911 to report that he stabbed his mother was shot several times by officers and wounded after he advanced on them while wielding a kitchen knife in front of a home near Balch and Cedar avenues in southeast Fresno. Officers fired three bean-bag rounds to try to get him to drop the knife. Four officers fired their guns at the man, who was taken to a hospital for treatment. When police entered the home, they found the man’s mother dead in the entryway. One of the officers who responded was faulted for not turning on his body camera.
Oct. 18, 2020: Police shot and killed a 32-year-old man armed with a rifle in central Fresno as officers responded to calls of an attempted carjacking and a suspicious person jumping into yards and onto rooftops in the neighborhood near McKinley and Fruit avenues. An elderly resident reported firing a .22-caliber rifle into the ground to scare the man out of his backyard, and then put his gun on a table in the yard as he went inside to call police. The man ran away, but then returned and took the rifle and made his way down the street.
Officers saw the man fire at a family standing in the road, and disobeyed the officers’ commands to drop the rifle. Eventually, one officer shot the man in the leg and sat down in the driveway of a home before pointing the rifle at officers several more times before he was shot multiple times by officers. He died later at a hospital where he was being treated for his injuries.
The man was later found to be a parolee wanted in Illinois.
April 10, 2021: A pit bull in a backyard was shot and killed by an officer as police responded to a domestic violence incident near Clinton Avenue and Highway 99 in central Fresno. As officers confronted the suspect, a police dog named Argo was unleashed to chase down the man, grabbing him by the arm. As the man stabbed the police dog with a box cutter, a pit bull at the home attacked Argo. Argo’s handler shot the pit bull, and another officer used a Taser on the man, who dropped his knife.
This story was originally published July 19, 2021 at 5:57 PM.
