When a law enforcement officer is involved in a shooting, some citizens will leap to the officer’s defense even before the incident has been objectively and completely investigated and the relevant facts reported.

In their uninformed zeal to publicly and loudly declare their “support” for law enforcement, those citizens will go on autopilot and invoke the sometimes-valid “split-second decision” defense.  The citizens will magnanimously proclaim, “Well, we have to cut law enforcement officers some slack, because after all, we expect them to make split-second, life-and-death decisions.  Sometimes they will make a mistake.”

Unquestionably there are times when the “split-second decision” to use lethal force is unavoidable, times when it is the only decision reasonably available to law enforcement officers.

However, chief executive law enforcement officers must have both the political courage and the leadership skills to ensure that the “split-second decision” defense is not abused, that it does not become the universal excuse.  It must never become an acceptable rationalization for encouraging or requiring their officers to take actions which may save time but are more likely to place the officers in situations requiring split-second decisions. 

On Friday, October 10, 2014, the Coeur d’Alene Press skewspaper published a guest opinion with the headline No, even cops aren’t perfect.  The opinion was attributed to William J. Yarwood who stated he had been a reserve police officer in a southern California city.  He then invoked the “split-second” defense four times in his commentary about the shooting of Arfee the dog by a Coeur d’Alene police officer.  Not once in his opinion piece did Yarwood question whether Officer Kelley and the trainee officer in his charge considered any safer alternative actions.

It seems to OpenCdA that we as citizens must demand the state’s law enforcement agencies give their employees every opportunity to find and choose safer alternatives to lethal force.  Instead of pushing law enforcement officers to default to expedient but higher risk actions which unnecessarily place the officers and the public in  greater jeopardy, we need to give law enforcement permission to slow down and back off in their responses, de-escalate the situation whenever that is reasonably possible.

We citizens also need to be certain of our own conduct.  Does the activity we’re observing really warrant a call for service to the police?  Before we call the police, we need to have arrived at an informed decision that calling the police is the most appropriate action to take.  We must do our part by not making unnecessary and sometimes completely inappropriate calls for service to the police, because every unnecessary call means there is one or more fewer officers available to handle the necessary ones safely.

When we citizens do call for law enforcement, we must accept a great deal of the responsibility for the way law enforcement responds.  Our communication with the police needs to be accurate and complete but without embellishment or speculation.  We need to choose our words very carefully to accurately and succinctly explain why we reasonably believe police action is necessary.   The words we choose will have consequences.  One need only listen to the  audio recording of the 9-1-1 call to the Spokane Police Department which resulted in the unnecessary and avoidable death of Otto Zehm to learn that lesson.

To our knowledge, the public has not yet heard the content of the call from the manager on Java on Sherman to the Coeur d’Alene Police Department that ended with a training officer shooting and killing Arfee the dog .  We would very much like to hear the recording of the initial call from Java on Sherman and then listen or read the content of subsequent radio and MDT transmissions.  The Police Department’s initial press release hints at what might have been stated or implied in the call.  Likewise, the external review contractor’s report observed that, “On July 9, 2014, at approximately 1123 hours Officers Kelley and Weidebush responded to essentially a suspicious vehicle radio call but what Officer Kelley believed to be an ‘in-progress enticement call in the parking lot of 819 Sherman Avenue.’ ”  So again we ask, what information communicated to Officer Kelley led him to believe he and Officer Weidebush were responding to an in-progress enticement call?

In his written report about his killing of Arfee the dog, Officer Kelley invoked “the split-second decision” defense.  He said, “Due to the aggressive nature of the dog, coupled with his apparent attempt to bite me, the dog forced me to make a split-second decision in circumstances that were tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.”

Really?  The dog forced him to make a split-second decision?  Was it also the dog who formed Officer Kelley’s thought processes about how to handle the situation?  Or might it have been his department’s lack of leadership and training coupled with supervisory pressure to clear calls expediently that “forced” Officer Kelley to act as he did?  What would have been wrong with safely containing and observing the van with more officers, thereby gaining some time to identify and locate the van’s owner and get a more complete picture of what was going on?  When Officer Kelley approached the van with his gun drawn, what information had he been given and what had he observed that led him to conclude the van might be “in fact occupied by a possible child enticing suspect”  and that the circumstances were so exigent that his actions were the only reasonable ones?

We still don’t know if Officer Kelley’s shooting and killing Arfee the dog was reasonable under the circumstances.  It was clearly avoidable, but the reports made available to the public do not give a complete picture of how Officer Kelley formed his decision to take the action he did.  None of the reports we reviewed included transcripts and recordings of the original telephone call from Java on Sherman to the police, nor did they include the subsequent written and verbal communications between Officer Kelley and central dispatch.  Everything in the reports suggests that somewhere in the communications, Officer Kelley formed the opinion that they were dispatched to an “in-progress enticement call in the parking lot of 819 Sherman Avenue.”  Why, we wonder, were those communications not included in the public reports?  Without those, there is still a significant piece missing from the puzzle.

We hope that Police Chief Lee White brings a new perspective to the Coeur d’Alene Police Department.  We hope that he will have the leadership skills and political courage so lacking in his predecessors to empower his officers to find and effectively use alternatives so that “split-second decisions” are less  frequent.