September 05, 2003

Scott McCollister Suspension Letter Reveals The Depth Of Mark Kroeker's Illogic

News outlets all over the Portland area now have in their possession copies of the letter written by former Police Chief Mark Kroeker to Officer Scott McCollister detailing Kroeker's reasons for suspending McCollister for 5 1/2 months without pay:

As is the case when deadly force is used, I have a responsibility to carefully review the decisions, thought-processes, actions and reactions of the officers involved, and make judgments about how the officers performed when using the power, authority and responsibility associated with deadly force.

I have concluded that based on the information available to me, the reason you used deadly force was to protect yourself from what you reasonably believed to be an immediate threat of death or serious physical injury. Your decision to use deadly force was consistent with the Bureau's deadly force policy, Directive 1010.10.

However, considering all the circumstances, you made some decisions that contributed to the development of this high-risk situation and deadly force incident. For this reason, I am proposing a suspension without pay.

Here we encounter the major flaw in Kroeker's illogic. While defending McCollister's use of deadly force as consistent with Bureau policy, and the result of McColliser reasonably believing he was in imminent danger, earlier in the same letter Kroeker writes the following:

While Bureau policy and training do not explicitly prohibit entering an occupied vehicle to remove a combative subject, officers are trained to evaluate all other options before subjecting themselves to the inherent risks of doing so.

Which is something, of course, that McCollister simply did not do. Strictly speaking, if policy and training indeed do not "explicitly prohibit entering an occupied vehicle to remove a combative subject," then it might indeed be tough to make a disciplinary case out of McCollister's failure to try other options beforehand. Nonetheless, it would seem clear that, at the very least, entering a vehicle under such circumstance is not actively encouraged, and -- this is the important part -- entering the vehicle at all was what started the incident down the road to tragedy.

What Kroeker in the letter calls his "concerns" are as follows:

1. Knowing Ms. James was a flight risk you ran to the open driver's side door and placed most of your weight, your head, and the left side of your body in the vehicle. You placed yourself at a distinct disadvantage and in a tactically inferior position. It closed the distance between you and Ms. James, and limited your ability to react. You either did not recognize or ignored the potential risk to your own safety and the safety of others.

2. You continued your primary focus of pulling Ms. James from the car through physical contact, despite the fact that you did not effectively deploy your pepper spray. Your attempts to utilize physical control did not work, and the hair hold did not work. In other words, you did not recognize that you were in a situation that became a competition in which you did not have the advantage. As you know, officers are taught to continually adapt and re-evaluate events and choose one option or a series of options that provide the advantage.

3. You knew that Officer Reynolds was Taser certified and that he was standing shoulder to shoulder with you, yet were so focused on physically pulling Ms. James from the car that your actions did not allow for optimal Taser deployment.

4. You over-relied on your ability to pull Ms. James from the vehicle and underestimated the risk she posed.

5. You chose to unholster your weapon in close contact and direct Ms. James to stop the car, rather than making an effort to extricate yourself from the vehicle.

In other words: McCollister did almost everything wrong, including entering the vehicle to begin with rather than attempting other options, not to mention then unholstering his weapon -- an act which inherently makes it more likely (although, no, not inevitable) that the weapon will be fired.

Every action McCollister took made it that much more likely that a dangerous and potentially deadly confrontation was about to occur.

Nonetheless, Kroeker, as we saw above, argues that McCollister's use of deadly force was consistent with Bureau guidelines.

Many people have been discussing what sort of messages we might be sending the officers of the Portland Police Bureau through enactment of the PARC recommendations (see Robert King complaining about writing reports, for example).

What kind of message does Kroeker send with his dazzling feat of erroneous logic and lack of intellectual follow-through? That even if most of the reason an officer feels they are somehow in imminent danger of injury or death is because they made wrongful decisions which led to that perceived danger, they will not be responsible for any injury or death they themselves cause.

Nice. And yet somehow, everyone is insisting that the McCollister matter is not one to be re-opened now that Kroeker is gone. Katz signed off on Kroeker's disciplinary decision. And Foxworth says it will not be looked at again.

(Warning: I very, very rarely go the profane route on this site. But I'm about to give myself a waiver in this instance, because I think it's called for.)

Fuck. That.

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