US COP IN TEEN KILLING CALLED FOR ‘CHANGE’ IN FORCE
LAPD officer under probe for double fatality shooting wanted the public ‘not to be scared of us’.
When he first moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago, William Dorsey Jones Jr was like many others before him, hoping to find a career in the entertainment industry. He went so far as to start his own company, Entourage Entertainment Group.
But when those dreams didn’t pan out, Mr Jones became a community relations specialist and patrol officer in the North Hollywood area — and he loved it. On social media, he seemed to have a sense of obligation, as a black police officer, to confront head-on the issues of racism and policing.
He ran a non-profit that mentored at-risk youth and helped coach a high school football team. Earlier this month, he drove a car filled with presents to hand out to children.
But on the day before Christmas Eve, Mr Jones became the latest face of an all-too-familiar story of American policing: a rapid-fire tactical operation in a store, crowded at one point with holiday shoppers, that left two unarmed civilians dead.
After responding to calls about a man attacking customers at a North Hollywood clothing store with a heavy bike lock, it was Mr Jones, his lawyer confirmed on Thursday, who shot and killed the man, Daniel Elena Lopez, 24. One of the bullets the 42-year-old officer fired skipped off the floor and through a wall, killing 14-year-old Valentina Orellana Peralta, who had been hiding in a dressing room with her mother.
“This is somebody who, four days ago, everybody in our country would be wanting to hire,” Tom Saggau, a spokesman for the Los Angeles police union, said of Mr Jones, whose future with the department now depends on the outcome of at least two investigations, as well as what lawyers representing Ms Orellana Peralta’s parents said would be a probable lawsuit.
Officers arrived at the Burlington clothing store and rushed in with weapons drawn; a store employee had alerted a dispatcher to customers being attacked with a bike lock, but other 911 callers reported that the assailant had a gun and had fired shots, the police said.
In body camera footage released this week, Mr Jones could be seen racing past his fellow officers with a drawn rifle, even as his colleagues called out to him to “slow down” and “hold up”.
“Let me take point with the rifle,” he said.
Only seconds after the officers encountered a woman with a bloodied head who had been scrambling to get away from Elena Lopez, Mr Jones opened fire, the footage showed. Elena Lopez fell to the ground as an anguished wail emanated from the dressing room where Orellana Peralta and her mother were hiding.
Mr Jones, who was on paid administrative leave and declined to discuss the episode, has a visible “heaviness on him”, his lawyer, Leslie Wilcox, said. She said he had never before been disciplined for a police shooting, and was surprised by the level of public anger directed at him, “as if Valentina’s death was intentional, or reckless on his part, which it was neither”.
Earlier this week, Mr Jones’ identity and badge number began to circulate on social media. At a news conference on Tuesday where Orellana Peralta’s family spoke, an attendee held a sign showing Mr Jones’ in-uniform portrait. Above the photo it read: “WANTED.”
Mr Jones scrubbed his digital footprint, shutting down the Twitter accounts he ran for his non-profit, his work as a coach and his police work. In his tweets, recovered through digital archives, he sometimes described racism that he had experienced and his hopes of improving the work of the police department and its relations with the community.
“I’m a Black man, I’m the father of a Black son,” he wrote on Twitter on Aug 27, saying that he had himself been a victim of “racism”.
“I’m the LAPD. I have the power & determination to affect CHANGE in the community,” he wrote.
In 2019, he spoke with a local news station about his approach to law enforcement.
“There’s no better crime reduction strategy than to engage with our youth, for them not to be scared of us, to let them know there are people out there who care,” Mr Jones said.
In a profile of Mr Jones on the website of the University of Louisville, where he had attended college after growing up in Kentucky, Mr Jones said he’d had a modest upbringing. His mother, Toya J Brazley, worked multiple jobs to help raise her three sons. His father, the elder William D Jones, worked in insurance.
In 2006, Mr Jones dropped out of college and moved to Los Angeles, a city eight times the size of his hometown. Initially, according to the profile, he had hoped to break into the entertainment industry. But he discovered a new calling in 2009, when he joined the Los Angeles Police Department. He liked it, as his lawyer said, because of his strong desire to help others.
Mr Jones eventually married, had a son and, in 2015, purchased a home in Santa Clarita, a town in the foothills north of Los Angeles where middle-class families often go to find a slice of suburbia.
In 2020, Mr Jones finished the credits he needed for his communications degree from Louisville. That same year, he and his wife started their non-profit, Officers for Change, which distributed donations of backpacks and school supplies from fellow officers, according to the police union.
Mr Jones also started an at-home business called Use of Force Fitness, public records show.
He found time to serve as an assistant football coach for the Valencia High School Vikings, joining the programme within the past couple of years as a wide receiver coach. The team celebrated winning a major regional title in November.
Kassie Devoll, the varsity team manager, said that members of the Valencia football community were “devastated” to hear that Mr Jones had been involved in the shooting that has been on the television news almost daily.
She said he had been a mentor and a role model for the football programme. “He made a direct impact on the entire team immediately.”
Ms Devoll said that high school football can be a high-pressure environment for teen boys. Coaches can be tough and angry. But Mr Jones, she said, was unfailingly positive and “really built them up as people”.
The case is set to be an early, closely watched test of two of California’s most significant police accountability reforms in recent years.
In 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law one of the nation’s toughest standards for the use of deadly force by police officers, requiring that officers use it only “when necessary in defence of human life”.
The law, which also requires authorities to evaluate if an officer took steps to de-escalate a situation or use less lethal weapons, was inspired by the death of Stephon Clark, who was shot by Sacramento police officers who mistook a cellphone he was holding for a gun. ©2022
This is somebody who, four days ago, everybody in our country would be wanting to hire
LOS ANGELES POLICE UNION SPOKESMAN TOM SAGGAU