May 01, 2004

Why Officer Sean Macomber Is The Key

Shifting The Focus From Officer Jason Sery

Wednesday afternoon, we made the assertion that as we try to determine just what went wrong when Officers Sean Macomber and Jason Sery stopped James Jahar Perez on a "pretext" traffic stop, more of our focus should be on Macomber and what he did or did not do.

At the time, we directed attention to that part of his testimony which reveals that in essence he forgot that he had a partner with him, and simply fell into a "fight or flight" instinct that pushed him to not even consider turning to his partner for assistance.

Upon further reflection, we believe we've gone one step further and identified to precise moment -- the precise decision -- which became the turning point of the incident.

That same day, Doctor William Lewinski testified that an officer's greatest fear is the fear of losing control over the situation. We think we know just when Macomber -- the "contact" officer in this situation (as opposed to Sery being the "cover" officer) -- lost control. And in that moment, he made an entirely wrong decision.

In general, testimony suggests that the point at which Officers Macomber and Sery began to feel that something might be amiss was when Perez rolled up his tinted driver's side window, making it impossible for them to have visual control over Perez' actions. While details vary, the general sense is that prior to this, there likely was some sort of interaction between Macomber and Perez -- or at least that Macomber was issuing verbal commands of some sort to Perez.

But the window being rolled up is the key moment to the entire incident.

As near as we can tell, once that window went up, eliiminating Macomber's visual control over Perez, the decision to rush the car, pull open the door, and escalate the level of contact between himself and Perez is a decision that took the situation in exactly the opposite direction from sensible procedure.

One that window went up, once visual control was lost, would it not have been a better tactic for Macomber and Sery to retreat to the relative cover of their patrol car and call for back-up, indicating to dispatch that a traffic stop had just resulted in a subject vanishing behind an overly-tinted window and leaving them with absolutely no clue as to what might be transpiring inside the vehicle?

Why rush the car? Why pull open the door? (Especially, for that matter, if Macomber was behaving as if he were without a partner, behaving as if he were on his own as is usually the case?) Why not instead call for additional officers and balance out the sudden unknown with the sheer force of numbers?

We repeat our earlier assertion: Officer Sean Macomber -- and not Officer Jason Sery -- is the the key to how this traffic stop went awry. As the driver of the patrol car, and as the "contact" officer, this was his call. And he made the wrong one.

What's all the more unsettling about this is that it means that the critical point of this incident is very much the same as it was in the Kendra James incident eleven months ago. Once a decision was made in that incident to try to escalate physical contact, and eventually try to remove James from the vehicle, everything went wrong.

And here we are again, with the same dramatically wrong error in police judgement. So much for having learned any of the right lessons from the shooting death of Kendra James.

Posted at 03:17 PM | PermalinkComments (2) | TrackBacks (1)
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