LAPD had less-lethal options, but man is dead
Officers are under scrutiny for shooting people in crisis who do not have firearms.
When Alan Castellanos began moving toward a team of Los Angeles police officers with a knife in his hand one afternoon in April, they seemed ready to hold him off without using deadly force.
Two officers had Tasers trained on Castellanos, another was aiming a beanbag shotgun, and a fourth was armed with a 40-millimeter hard-foam projectile launcher.
Yet within seconds, Castellanos was on the ground with a fatal gunshot wound to the abdomen, after a fifth officer shot him with a handgun just as another deployed a Taser.
For Castellanos’ family, the killing was incomprehensible.
“They’re overreacting. They’re not planning,” Castellanos’ sister Cristian Mendoza said of the officers involved. “It makes it seem like they have no care for human life.”
“Clearly the LAPD didn’t do their job right. There could have been a better outcome,” said Castellanos’ wife, Nailea Vera Castellanos. “And it’s not the first time it’s happened.”
According to a recent Times investigation, Castellanos’ shooting was at least the eighth in two years in which groups of officers simultaneously fired handguns and weapons meant to avoid killing, such as projectile launchers or Tasers. In each incident, the person shot was armed with a knife or some other edged or blunt object, not a firearm. In many cases, the person appeared to be mentally ill.
The shootings have raised concern among LAPD officials who have said they are working to address the issue by retraining officers to hold off on using deadly force if possible until less-lethal options have been tried.
Shooting survivors and relatives of those killed have filed lawsuits challenging LAPD officers’ actions. The decision to fire bullets before giving Tasers or nonlethal projectiles a chance to subdue a suspect is evidence of excessive force and poor oversight by the department, the lawsuits claim.
Last month, a federal judge ruled that an LAPD officer was personally liable for violating a homeless man’s rights when he shot the man in 2019 on a Venice street despite being surrounded by officers armed with less-lethal weapons. U.S. District Court Judge Dolly Gee found Officer Jonathan Concetti responsible for excessive force, as
sault, battery and negligence in the shooting of John Penny, who was wounded but survived. Penny appeared to be in mental distress at the time of the shooting, holding a wooden board and moving erratically around an alleyway.
Gee issued her ruling in a summary judgment early in the proceedings. She rejected Concetti’s claim that the controversial judicial doctrine known as qualified immunity protected him from personal liability for actions on the job.
Gee concluded that Penny hadn’t committed a crime, wasn’t attempting to flee, had not attacked officers and did not present an “imminent harm” to Concetti when the officer fired. She also found that a supervisor had ordered the use of less-lethal weapons, which were available at the scene, and that the officers hadn’t warned Penny that he could be shot. Gee noted that many officers were present, outnumbering Penny.
Based on those factors, the judge concluded, “holding a wooden board and refusing to drop it” was not a justification for Concetti to shoot Penny. The officer violated Penny’s constitutional rights, she ruled.
Concetti appealed the decision last week to the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. His attorneys declined to comment, as did the city attorney’s office. A separate ruling by Gee on the actions of Concetti’s supervisor is also being appealed; claims against other involved officers are set for trial.
Shaleen Shanbhag, one of Penny’s attorneys, said the ruling was an unprecedented victory for victims of police shootings and should be seen as a warning to the LAPD and to individual officers that, while each case is unique, the use of deadly force over less-lethal options will be scrutinized closely.
Denisse Gastélum, an attorney for Castellanos’ family, said she was studying the ruling in the Penny case closely as she and the family consider filing a lawsuit against the city.
“What is this less-lethal for? For show? For appeasement? For some kind of check mark?” Gastélum asked, noting that “clearly there’s not communication” about using the less-lethal weapons first. “These lesslethal weapons are designed to control. Firearms are designed to kill. You use them at the exact same time, what’s going to happen? You’re going to kill.”
The LAPD identified the officer who shot Castellanos as James Galbraith. Dave Winslow, the officer’s attorney, said Galbraith “had no other choice but to shoot” after Castellanos moved rapidly toward him and his fellow officers at close range.
“If he didn’t shoot in that moment, he could have been stabbed, injured, killed,” Winslow said.
Winslow said the fact that officers used less-lethal and lethal force simultaneously was “not a failure of the planning” by the officers but a “failure of the policy” of the LAPD — which precludes officers from shooting people with less-lethal weapons unless they present an “immediate threat of violence or physical harm” to officers. That is essentially the same standard applied to the use of deadly force, Winslow said.
There were a few moments just before the shooting when Castellanos was farther away from the officers — and not as immediate of a threat — that would have been “a perfect time” to hit him with projectiles or Tasers, Winslow said, but doing so would have violated LAPD policy.
“The policy needs to be changed to allow the officers more discretion to use lesslethal before lethal is required,” Winslow said.
LAPD officials did not respond to a request for comment.
The shooting remains under investigation and has yet to come before the civilian L.A. Police Commission, which will rule on whether the officers’ actions violated department policy.
On a recent afternoon, Castellanos’ family gathered around a wide coffee table where they spread out photographs of Castellanos, whom they described as a doting son, a good husband, a loving father and a goofy sibling and uncle. Castellanos worked in construction. He was trying to save money for his daughter’s quinceañera and liked to make prank calls to family members. He helped get the family through the recent death of a sister to cancer.
Mendoza, Castellanos’ sister, said the family doesn’t know what was going on with him the day he was shot, when a woman in an apartment called 911 to say a man was smashing windows outside and threatening her. But clearly he was “going through some sort of mental breakdown,” she said.
She expressed dismay that such an outcome could be acceptable in L.A., where police frequently encounter mentally ill people.
“This time it was us, and it needs to stop here. Next time it could be anybody else’s family,” Mendoza said. “We shouldn’t be worrying about who’s next. That shouldn’t be a worry that anybody should have.”