MAN WITH KNIFE SHOT BY SDPD OFFICER

Police say pedestrians in Gaslamp Quarter felt threatened by suspect

A veteran San Diego police officer shot and wounded a 69-year-old man who police said was armed with a knife Thursday night near the Gaslamp Quarter, officials said.

Medics took the man to a hospital, where he underwent surgery for at least one gunshot wound, San Diego police homicide Capt. Rich Freedman said. The man was in stable condition late Thursday night.

Someone flagged down the officer just after 7 p.m. to report a man with a knife near Third Avenue and G Street, Freedman said. The officer was told the armed man was “causing pedestrians to feel fearful and making them move out into the street to avoid him.”

The officer approached the man, “who was standing on the southwest corner amidst a good deal of debris and holding a bowl of food,” homicide Lt. Andra Brown said in a news release Friday morning.

Brown said that as the officer spoke with the man, he pulled out the knife — despite an order not to touch it — and threatened the officer.

The officer shot the man at least once in his torso, Freedman said.

Other officers were in the intersection and helped provide medical aid to the man, who was conscious at the scene before medics took him to the hospital, according to Freedman. The man’s name was not released.

The captain said he believed the officer had his body-worn camera turned on. The homicide unit is investigating the shooting, as it does for all shootings involving law enforcement in the city.

Brown said the officer, whose name was not released, has been with the department for 26 years, and is assigned to the neighborhood policing division. He was not injured.

Witnesses told police the man appeared to be “transient” and was acting “irrationally,” Freedman said.

The investigation Thursday night was centered on the southeast corner of Third Avenue and G Street, which was strewn with plastic shopping bags and other trash. Brown said detectives found a knife at the shooting scene.

Two witnesses told a reporter they drove past the man just before he was shot. They said he appeared to be acting erratically and “causing a commotion,” and was surrounded on the street corner by a large amount of garbage.

The shooting is the first by police this year in San Diego. Seventeen people were shot — either wounded or killed — by law enforcement offi

cers in the county last year. Ten of those shootings involved San Diego police officers.

Those shootings, like Thursday’s, occurred after a new state law — AB 392 — raised the standard for when police can use deadly force. It allows law enforcement officers to use deadly force only when “necessary,” when their life or the lives of others are in imminent danger and when there is no other alternative to de-escalate the situation, such as using non-lethal methods.

The legislation marked a change from the previous standard, which allowed using deadly force when an officer had a “reasonable” fear of imminent harm.