Ambushes of police rare but a concern
Columbus officers in one of the city’s busiest precincts flooded South Linden the day before Thanksgiving looking for suspected robbers. It would be more than an hour before the sun would rise.
A green Kia Soul spotted circling through the neighborhood was stopped shortly after a robbery near East 17th and Louis avenues just before 6 a.m. Extra officers were there as backup.
What would normally be a routine stop took a sinister turn as gunfire sounded, apparently directed toward officers. Although it was another close call, no one was hit.
Experts and investigators say ambush shootings targeting officers are rare. However, it’s hard to determine if the numbers are going up or down because no one tracks shootings aimed at officers when they don’t cause injuries.
“There is no good research evidence on whether ambushes are increasing,” said Ed Maguire, a criminaljustice professor at Arizona State University. “There is certainly a sense in the field
that they are increasing, but we cannot be sure about that until we study it.”
Maguire has studied whether there has been increasing violence — both fatal and nonfatal assaults — against police since Michael Brown, a black man, was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014. That and several other high-profile, deadly force incidents have led to protests in recent years, fueling a civil-rights movement that has questioned police tactics.
Maguire reviewed nonfatal-assault data from January 2010 to December 2015 from 5,089 U.S. police agencies that submitted data to the FBI between 2010 and 2015. He also examined fatal assaults against police from January 2010 to March 2016.
“There is also a strong sense in the field that fatal and nonfatal assaults against police are increasing postFerguson, but our research evidence shows this not to be true,” he said.
Maguire said he will update his research in 2018 to “determine whether the downward pattern has persisted.”
In the South Linden incident on Nov. 22, Columbus police Officer Phillip Stevens was leaning on the front passenger-side window of the Kia Soul talking to the driver, 24-year-old Brandi Watson, when the first shot was fired.
Seconds later, a barrage of gunfire — about nine shots — followed. An unknown person who ran between homes had fired a handgun.
Stevens dropped face down to the ground and crawled to safety behind the compact crossover vehicle, according to video capturing the incident that was viewed by The Dispatch.
Two other officers approached with guns drawn. All three took a defensive position. Neither Watson nor Stevens was struck.
As officers removed Watson from the vehicle, cocaine fell next to the Kia Soul. Watson, of the Northeast Side, was later arrested on a drug-possession charge, according to an arrest report.
Before the shooting, police had asked Sharissa Cook, 24, to get out of the front passenger seat. Cook, an East Side resident who was wanted on arrest warrants, was led to a police cruiser. After the gunfire, the seat she had vacated moments earlier had a bullet hole at heart level.
That neighborhood has been the site of other incidents that have sparked protests at City Hall and calls
for police reforms.
Henry Green, 23, was shot and killed by plainclothes officers Jason Bare and Zachary Rosen in June 2016. Green had fired six shots, and officers returned fire, killing him.
On April 8, Officer Rosen was caught on cellphone video stomping once with his left foot on a suspect who was lying face down and handcuffed by another officer at the end of a driveway in Linden. The suspect was accused of shooting up a house and assaulting the arresting officer. Rosen was fired, but he is going through the arbitration process to get his job back.
Most residents in the city’s South Linden neighborhood are minorities, and one-third are unemployed, according to Census Bureau data. The neighborhood also has higher crime levels than other parts of the city.
Officers don’t believe last week’s shooting is indicative of tensions between officers and residents, Columbus police spokeswoman Denise Alex-Bouzounis said.
“Most people in the higher-crime areas tell us they want more officers out patrolling their neighborhood,” she said.
Incidents such as last week’s tend to happen in “extremely disadvantaged communities,” said Nicholas Corsaro, a criminal-justice professor at the University of Cincinnati. “These incidents are symptomatic of greater problems.”
Officers have been targeted in South Linden before.
In July 2016, officers responded to a report of a firearm discharged into an apartment in the 1100 block of Windsor Avenue. Officers found two apartments and multiple vehicles struck by bullets. As officers waited for investigators, someone fired on them using a high-caliber gun. No suspect was ever identified.
“Anytime an officer is fired upon, extra precautions are taken,” Alex-Bouzounis said. “Whether it be two officers per cruiser or other safety measures.”
There’s not much officers can do to prevent attacks, said David Klinger, a criminal-justice professor at the University of MissouriSt. Louis and a former Los Angeles police officer.
“When tensions are high and there’s word on the street that ambushes are contemplated, police officers are alert and aware, but you still have to do your regular work,” he said. “They can be extra cautious and pay a little more attention, but quite frankly, police officers … need to be cognizant at all times that they are a target.”
Detectives are still working on leads to identify the gunman in last week’s shooting.
Shell casings recovered at the scene were matched to another shooting that happened nearly four hours earlier on the Near East Side, near East Main Street and Berkeley Road. A man and woman suffered minor injuries after a gunman in a car fired on them.
Anyone with information about the shootings is asked to call Columbus police assault detectives at 614-645-4141 or remain anonymous by calling Central Ohio Crime Stoppers at 614-461-TIPS (8477).