Daniel Shaver’s widow receives eight million dollars for his wrongful death at the hands of the police
…[T]he town of Mesa, Arizona, reached an $8 million settlement last week with the widow of Daniel Shaver. Shaver is the unarmed man who was fatally shot while crawling down a hallway on his hands and knees toward police officers, begging them not to shoot him.
In January 2016, Mesa police responded to a report of a man pointing a rifle out of a hotel window. It was in fact Shaver showing a pellet gun that he used at his exterminator job to a couple other hotel guests in his room.
Police ordered Shaver out of the hotel room and onto the ground, with his hands behind his head. But instead of handcuffing Shaver, officers—bizarrely—started barking confusing and contradictory orders at him to crawl toward them. As a clearly terrified and drunk Shaver tried to crawl toward the police, he appeared to reach toward his waistband to pull up his sagging shorts. A Mesa officer, Philip Mitchell Brailsford, shot Shaver five times with an AR-15, killing him.
Here is a link to the video. I warn you that it is extremely harrowing to watch.
I wrote a post about Shaver’s death back in 2017, and I’ve not wavered from the point of view I expressed there. One misunderstanding many people have about this horrific incident is the idea that it was the officer yelling the ridiculous and impossible-to-follow orders at Shaver who actually did the shooting. But that was not the case. It was another officer who shot Shaver when he thought he was reaching for a weapon.
The officer who shot Shaver was acquitted in the criminal case and given a pension for PTSD. The officer giving the bizarre instructions quit the police force after a few months and moved to the Phillipines; he was never tried for anything. If Shaver had been black, I think the riots that would have ensued would have been far worse than those following the death of George Floyd.
Shaver’s widow has some extra money now. But it’s small payment for what happened to him, which cannot be compensated for by an award of money.
I live in Mesa now. It’s the 34th-largest city in the U.S. But it’s really just a big town, with a population of 550,000. Coming from Minneapolis, where blood on the ground *may* get a single officer to come, if he’s not tied up with a dead body, Mesa is startling: a shoplifter may get ten police responding.
And in this case they had plenty of cops. Set up a perimeter, and call from the office: “Hello, this is Lt. Swatteam. We have a report you’re pointing a weapon out the window. So what’s going on?” Because, you know, possession of a rifle in a Mesa hotel room is entirely legal.
I’ve asked a couple of Mesa cops about it, and they don’t speak, just shake their heads. I need to ask a couple of other folks. But as near as I can tell, the city knew this was bad, really bad, from day one. So they let the county attorney take it to the grand jury, which only saw what the CA wanted them to see, and the grand jury returned no true bill on both the commander and the shooter. They were allowed to slink away.
And now, six years later, a settlement. I’m glad the widow got something. She should have had it six years ago.
It’s not that there aren’t any awful cases of police misconduct, it’s just that their prevalence is way overstated for political reasons.
Without question, this was horribly wrong. There’s no excuse for it.
Looking at what happened to Derek Chauvin and the other Floyd cops, what happened to the Somali pet of Mayor Hodges who executed Justine Damond, what happened to the hysterical cop who killed Philando Castile, and what happened to the cops responsible for this travesty in Arizona, I’d have to say our court system stinks on ice.
The officers responsible for this travesty of justice got off Scott free and the Mesa taxpayers got the $8 million bill. Compare this to the situation of Kimberly Potter who made an honest mistake.
Such an award has the faint aura of a penalty…for somebody. So justice is, at least, addressed if not served.
“They’ll pay!”
So, whatever the rational view of things–the settlement does not make the family whole except in terms of replacing lost income–there’s a subconscious satisfaction that things have been made right.
Might be more correct if, say, anybody in the command chain got a permanent 10% cut in pay. After all, they knew or should have known what a pair of loose cannons these two cops were.
But nobody responsible is, in fact, penalized beyond the cops involved and even they aren’t doing so badly.
Best that can be said is the voters are now supposed to figure out how to vote so this doesn’t happen again. That’s a tough one.
I worked in Mesa 40 years ago for two years. The town, now city, was established by Mormons, who at that time were a majority of the population. Serious crime was then unheard of in Mesa, and its all-white cops were mannerful. Clearly, in-migration by the common herd over the years since has diluted the unequivocal Mormon morality.
This same dilution is being spurred by Democrats who ignore the open southern border and the Mexican cartels’ delivery of fentanyl, the precursor chemicals of which come to Mexico from China to the cartels, who make the final product, which kills 100,000 young Americans each year. But the Dems do not care.
I find it difficult to believe that an officer with a profanity riddled threat on his service weapon could walk away free, let alone with a PSTD pension.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver#Termination_from_police_department
The CHP officer, Melanie Singer, who was about to shoot Rodney King when the LAPD guys showed up and subdued him without serious injury, testified against them at two trials and then retired on PTSD disability. The cops, who saved King’s life, went to prison.
Cicero:
On Philip Brailsford, the police officer who shot Daniel Shaver:
sonny wayz:
That fact was not allowed in evidence, nor was the video. After the video was released – which was a few hours AFTER Brailsford’s acquittal – people were aghast and incensed.
Bucky:
Different localities and state laws, different standards of proof, different judge rulings about videos, and in particular one case was pre-Floyd and one case was post-Floyd in Minnesota (Potter).
Anyone remember Tony Timpa?
Bill Serra:
Yes. See this.
I am a big supporter of law enforcement. But this is a ghastly example of what can go wrong in an encounter. These officers should be doing the time that Floyd’s arresting officers are doing. And Floyd’s arresting officers should be free. Very unequal and unjust outcomes.
Like, others, I’m glad the family got some financial reward, even though it can never make up for the loss of her husband.
Every police shooting is routinely investigated. Here in Washington state some departments now have outside investigators look at the evidence and make the decision as to whether to charge or not. Body cameras are now being routinely used in larger departments. They also provide a better level of evidence than just officer accounts.
I don’t blame cops for becoming paranoid. We had a local officer killed a few months back. He saw a man moving guns from one car to another. He approached the perp and asked him what he was doing. With no warning the perp grabbed a handgun off the seat of the car and shot the cop. Then, for good measure he ran over him with his car. The perp was caught and arrested pretty quickly, but when this sort of incident occurs, it makes policemen/women very jumpy.
When police do commit a crime as in the Shaver case, we can hope that they will get charged and prosecuted accordingly. And the police should know that they will be held to a high standard. But we also need to have our mayors/city councils/governors/legislatures back the police without reservation. Without that backing it becomes very difficult to recruit the numbers and type of people needed for law enforcement. Seattle, Minneapolis, New York City, Los Angles, and other cities are not able to keep their forces up to the numbers needed to be effective at reducing crime. That’s a major concern right now.
I did speak to a long-time Mesa cop about the Shaver case.
He first pointed out a lot of details, some of which I knew, that weren’t apparent from the video. Then, he said the scene commander and the shooter cop were both wrong, wrong, and deserved worse than they got.
It wasn’t the SWAT team. It seems the SWAT team works 8 to 5 and isn’t called out at night but for special circumstances. It was a routine response with a bunch of patrol cops, led by a sergeant. The whole confusing screaming begins to make sense if one understands that the screamer (the sergeant) had no special training.
So instead of moving in once the victim was prone, limbs extended, the sergeant kept screaming at a drunk, terrified man to crawl toward the police, but crawl in this manner, not another, and then contradicted his instructions. The victim kept trying to pull up his shorts. The last attempt to do so triggered the shooter.
The cops were overcharged. This led to the acquittal.
Mesa even now has a lot of Mormon residents. Arizona has a lot of Mormon residents. For those who haven’t lived around a lot of Mormons, it’s a lot like living around Scandinavians, but with less swearing and drinking and more of a sense of humor. They’re good neighbors.
They look after their own, but with a deep obligation to not be a burden on others via dissipation. They are also civic minded (the fundametalist Mormon groups are very different, and hostile to local authorities, and very willing to exploit the system. But they are relatively few in number).
Mesa has acquired some cops who bailed on Minneapolis. It’s not often you get to recruit good mid-career cops so inexpensively.
The “ten squad cars respond to a shoplifter:” He wasn’t embarassed about that. Under Arizona law, if you ask police to come, they’re supposed to come (Phoenix can no longer meet that). He did say that it might be a good idea, once the perp is cuffed, that some of those responding cops should be going back on patrol, rather that having a large bull session.
Gordon Scott
WRT your fourth graf about the screaming sergeant Is training really necessary not to do that?
Insofar as I can recall my JV football team–that was sixty-plus years ago–everybody I can recall had more presence of mind than that.
And, I’m sure, my granddaughters, one of whom is just eleven.
” If Shaver had been black, I think the riots that would have ensued would have been far worse than those following the death of George Floyd.”
You can bet your life’s savings on that.
I always felt that Derek Chauvin’s crime was not act of racism but was an abuse of authority.
No chauvin was just the second match they used the incident up in georgia was a wet one initially
Richard,
Better training would have had the scene commander not having his force bunched at one end of a long hallway and the “suspects” at the other. Assuming worst situation, the police are a big fat target and the suspect a small one. Also, since this is Arizona, a call to the room from the office would have resolved the tension before any rifles were pointed. The victim may have behaved somewhat foolishly, but he didn’t break any laws, and deserved the presumption of innocence.
Some tactical training would have helped that sergeant to stop, take a deep breath, and rachet the tension back. Because you don’t want to have a shooting!
It’s no different from the training I did in the Air Force decades ago. Okay, now you have to deploy to a new location, and keep up your support of the flying mission. What do you need to bring? Is there a better way to pack it? Can we have a complete set of materials so that if the call comes, we can grab it and run?
And then you actually do it. Grab the stuff, load it on the truck (it was a dark blue school bus) and off you go. Now set up a weather station in the parking lot of a national guard armory 50 miles away. Whoops, we didn’t bring a portable light! Those markers dried out since we put them in the box. Make notes, go home, write a newer, better plan. And test it.
In this case, remind the sergeant that he’s not commanding the 82nd Airborne Tactical Hotel Assault Squad. He’s a police officer, a civilian. So quit trying to act like you’re Barney Bad Ass, think about what you’re there for–to answer a simple question–and make sure everyone is calm and fingers aren’t on the bang switch.
So when the time does come, you’ve been there before, and you have some confidence that you can handle the adversity. And, not sound like a hysterical idiot, and kill an innocent man who was no threat.
Gordon Scott. I was Infantry and I go back further–vague recollections of my JV football team for grins–to think of guys who wouldn’t need the training or experience this clown apparently needed not to be a murderous hysteric. That’s presuming he wasn’t getting his jollies.
But tactical dispositions notwithstanding, yelling at a guy in that position was criminally negligent. What kind of training does it take to make somebody not that stupid? Or, what kind of command do you have not to know the guy’s that stupid?
As a hypo, Army style. Three or four guys go into town and tear up a bar. Two or three times in a month. The company commander isn’t liable for the furniture, not is he going to be prosecuted for the offenses. He will be marked down for failure of leadership or some such, which is to say he didn’t figure out how to shuffle these guys off to some other unit before things got bad. Or go UCMJ on them so they didn’t have a chance to go off post or….had a heart-to-heart which straightened them out. His OER will reflect that negativity and he probably won’t make major.
In the instant situation, it would be interesting to know what this guy got away with and wasn’t fired, not to mention made sergeant. This couldn’t be his first oopsie. Command, without laying a finger on the motel situation, is guilty here.
@ Richard Aubrey,
Leadership, as an Infantry leader would understand it, is not a requirement for law enforcement “leaders”. Having spent time in both worlds of Infantry and law enforcement, I saw this first hand. A law enforcement leader is more of an administrative manager and supervisor then they are a fire team leader.
There are exceptions, of course, for tactical teams and the like. And there are the occasional fellow veterans on the force, who were squared away leaders in the military and bring some of that into their law enforcement position. But your run-of-the-mill patrol sergeant got those stripes by scoring well on an administrative test and possibly checking off some demographic blocks, depending on the agency.
What galls me about this whole situation is the complete circling of the wagons between the PD, the city, and the DA who presented the case to the grand jury. It seems that at every step of the way, they endeavored to keep their men out of the hot seat and actively thwart any sort of justice for Daniel and his family. If I recall from my reading, the city went as far as to re-hire the shooter into a admin position for the singular purpose to extend his civil service and qualify him for a disability pension. Taxpayer dollars hard at work.
Nor does it seem that the city or PD admitted any sort of fault or accepted any sort of blame. I’m sure the settlement was the best that Daniel’s widow was going to get, and I’m sure that there is a “we admit no wrongdoing” in the legalese.
Grunt. I get the difference, tactically. But the cops’ command had charge of the sergeant and, either he never made a mistake of any substance, or they didn’t care. In either case, he became a sergeant and, in my book, shouldn’t have because he must have screwed up enough earlier in his career to at least not be promoted, if not fired.
When his admin review came around and a previous screw-up was obvious…and nothing is done…that’s on command.
My understanding is that the man they gunned down was working in pest control, and someone saw him with an air rifle and called the cops. It’s generally best to avoid calling the cops unless it is necessary.
Good points, all. I don’t know if anyone else here has read Radley Balko’s “Rise of the Warrior Cop” which documents how much law enforcement culture has changed since the 1960s. Back then, the idea that an LEO would throw any kind of explosive into a room was unthinkable. Now it’s routine, despite many injuries to citizens.
For me a defining moment was during the riots in Ferguson, MO, when the cops showed up with a belt-fed machine gun on top of an APC. Both Republican and Democrat administrations are guilty of showering military weapons on local PDs.
And now we have SWAT teams crashing into an old woman’s house in search of a cell phone (wasn’t there) because a cop showed a “find me” app to a judge. Only there were five other houses in the possible range!