Union chief: Police can’t second guess

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

A rash of police-involved shootings shouldn’t create a situation where officers have to second guess their responses to potentially deadly emergencies, the head of the Columbus police union said.

Police in Columbus, the nation’s 15th largest city, were already on their way to approaching a record number of shootings this year when they fatally shot a man Tuesday who had reported a break-in at his apartment Tuesday.

The case is under investigation and an internal review team will forward results to the county prosecutor, as is common practice in police shootings.

“I’m encouraging our people to respond to a suspect’s actions and don’t worry about statistics,” Jim Gilbert, president of the Columbus Fraternal Order of Police, said Friday. “It’s important to keep doing what they’re doing.”

He said the mass shooting at a Colorado movie theater at a midnight viewing of the new Batman movie illustrated the need for officers to act fast.

“If that was a Columbus movie theater last night, would you or the public or anybody want officers second guessing whether or not they should go in and try to find this guy that’s doing all this shooting?” he said.

“We can’t hesitate, we have to go, we have to still respond when officers are being threatened or members of public are being threatened.”

In Tuesday’s incident in Columbus, police say 21-year-old Destin Thomas was shot twice by Officer William Kaufman after Thomas ran outside a building after calling 911.

Thomas was shot in his hip and chest and died at the scene, police said. One man is in custody and another is being sought in connection with the burglary.

Thomas had a gun in his hand when Kaufman confronted him, Gilbert said.

“I can’t give you the specifics about what he did, actions or anything like that. That’s going to be up to the officer when he gives his statement,” he said. Gilbert said people with guns need to be very careful when confronted by police.

Police spokesman Sgt. Rich Weiner would only confirm that a gun was found by Thomas’ body.

A relative of Thomas has criticized police, saying it wasn’t enough to say that officers responded according to their training.

“I didn’t know you were trained to kill the person you were supposed to help,” Derek Harris, 24, told The Columbus Dispatch for a story Friday.

Weiner said the public doesn’t generally understand how quickly officers have to react when they come upon such a situation.

He gave the example of a March shooting downtown, in which video from Officer Deborah Ayers’ police cruiser recorded her firing multiple shots at a man just 11 seconds after her car stops a few dozen feet from the scene.

“They have to process exactly what’s going on, they have to decide, ‘Is this a threat, are other people in danger, where is my cover, what kind of force am I using, are there people behind him, is that a gun, is that knife?”’ he said.

“And as long as it takes me to explain it, most incidents have been over for quite a while,” Weiner said.

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Andrew Welsh-Huggins can be reached at http://twitter.com/awhcolumbus.