![]() 14 meeting of the Police Commission, giving emotional testimony, calling for the officers involved to be held accountable and describing how his death had left a huge hole in their lives that they could never hope to fill. Several of Smith’s relatives attended the Nov. Understaffing at the county has resulted in gaps of coverage by the mental health co-responder teams, Moore has previously said. Moore has expressed support for partnering officers with mental health workers but has maintained that incidents involving armed suspects require some sort of police response. LAPD data show that 35% of the people shot at in 2022 were showing obvious signs of mental distress, a 6% decrease from the year before. In recent years, the LAPD and other law enforcement agencies nationwide have faced increasing criticism for how often officers shot people in the throes of a mental health crisis. Smith’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city in July, alleging that the involved officers unnecessarily escalated the encounters while contending that “there were other reasonable alternatives to using deadly force against (Smith) which were available and not utilized prior to using deadly force.” The suit is pending. Alejandre shot twice, while Zizzo fired five rounds. The standoff ended when the officers opened fire, killing Smith as he knelt on the kitchen floor holding a knife. At one point, Smith fell to the ground and dropped the knife, but picked it up. Inside, the officers confronted Smith, engaging in a tense back-and-forth with the incoherent man.īoth Alejandre and Zizzo fired their Tasers at Smith after he picked up a kitchen knife and wouldn’t drop it but the electrified barbs didn’t appear to have any effect on Smith, who pulled them out of his skin. But she also relayed that he had been diagnosed with schizophrenia and implored them not to kill him. In an exchange that was captured on Alejandre’s body-worn camera, she warned him that her husband had threatened to fight police if they were called and that there was a knife in the kitchen. “The stabbing motion to me appeared that it could reach me,” said Alejandre, who is 5'4", according to the chief’s report.Ī few hours later, a group of officers showed up and instructed her to wait outside while they checked on her husband, Shameka Smith said. ![]() In an interview after the shooting, Alejandre told department investigators he felt that even while on his knees Smith could still cause him harm because of his 6'1" height. Some of those concerns were reflected in his report about the incident, released Tuesday, which synthesized the findings of a months-long investigation of the incident. Days after Smith was shot, Moore took the unusual step of publicly second-guessing the officers’ actions, telling reporters at a news conference that he worried about the “actions of our officers and supervisors.” In that incident, Keenan Anderson, a school teacher and cousin of Black Lives Matter Global Network co-founder Patrisse Cullors, died several hours after an officer stunned him repeatedly with a Taser after a traffic accident.Īs with Anderson’s case, Smith’s death was held up by mental health practitioners and critics of the department as proof that officers are ill-equipped to make the right decisions when confronting people in distress. Last month, the commission concluded that officers involved in one of those deaths broke from department policy on multiple occasions. Moore agreed with an internal force review board that said Alejandre and his police partner, Audrey Lopez Alonzo, had “sufficient time to contact” the Mental Evaluation Unit, or MEU, which pairs officers with county social workers trained in de-escalating standoffs with people thought to be mentally ill. Rather, a dispatcher informed the responding officers that Smith said he intended to fight police.īy a 4-0 tally, the commission agreed with Chief Michel Moore’s findings that officers Joseph Zizzo and Nicolas Alejandre acted inappropriately when they fired a combined seven rounds at Smith, who used a pair of bikes to create a barrier between himself and police as he stood in the kitchen, holding a knife.Īfter officers shocked Smith several times with a Taser, he was knocked to his knees and lost control of the blade officers opened fire when he picked up the knife again. She mentioned several times that he hadn’t been taking his medication to treat schizophrenia, but the information wasn’t relayed over a radio transmission dispatching officers to the scene.
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