At 5 a.m. on May 11, Austin police officer Leonardo Quintana approached a Mercedes-Benz station wagon parked at an East Austin apartment complex.
The station wagon had been linked to robberies in the area, and a couple of days earlier, residents had complained about shots fired from a similar station wagon.
Quintana apprehended the driver of the vehicle without any struggle and placed him in his patrol car as two other officers, John Alexander Hitzelberg and Mohammad Siddiqui, arrived on the scene.
Quintana returned to the station wagon and found 18-year-old Nathaniel Sanders dozing in the back seat. The officer shook Sanders’ shoulder, prodded his face and nudged his chest, rousing him from his sleep. When Sanders woke up, he reached for a handgun hidden in his waistband. The two struggled. Quintana retreated and fired one, two, three shots. One hit Sanders in the back of the head, killing him.
The other sleeping passenger, Sir Lawrence Smith, was abruptly awoken by the gunfire. As he exited the passenger’s seat of the car, running, he was shot in the stomach by Quintana.
That’s the official narrative, according to an Austin Police Department YouTube video recounting the shooting.
The problem? Quintana never activated his on-dash camera. Neither did his back-up officer, Siddiqui. The only activated camera was in Hitzelberg’s patrol car, which was pointed away from the scene. Hitzelberg’s camera recorded audio of the incident, but the only video it captured was Smith running out of the car and Quintana’s subsequent shots.
Quintana killed one suspect and severely wounded another, but there’s no video evidence to corroborate the officers’ recollection of events, and Quintana received minimal punishment for failing to provide that evidence.
Legitimate questions about appropriate use of force were raised, most notably by Sanders’ family, who filed a lawsuit against Quintana and the city of Austin. Though a Travis County grand jury did not indict Quintana, community members, activists and the Sanders family protested the decision.
For its part, APD relied on an internal affairs investigation to determine if the use of force was warranted. An independent review by KeyPoint Government Solutions later found that the internal affairs investigation was biased in favor of the police department “in a way which undermine[d] the credibility of its investigation.” It then became public that one of the internal investigators, Det. Chris Dunn, had sent out an e-mail regarding the shooting that read, “We can make [them] a causation of the entire event. I am so smart I scare myself. Thoughts?”
Police Chief Art Acevedo declared Wednesday at Quintana’s sentencing that the officer’s use of force was “reasonable,” though he said he would not have handled the situation in the same way.
It’s impossible to say if the officers intentionally left their cameras off. Perhaps they were too distracted to turn them on, or perhaps they felt it would be to their advantage to leave them off — or, in Hitzelberg’s case, positioned away from the officers. While we cannot determine the officers’ intentions, we do know that their actions have severely complicated and hindered an investigation into their use of force.
Acevedo should have responded by adequately punishing the officers to show that he understands the gravity of the situation and cares if his officers use a level of force appropriate in response to the threat.
Instead, he let the two officers off with light sentences: Quintana was suspended for 15 days, without pay, and Siddiqui was suspended for three days. Further demonstrating his nonchalance toward the shootings, Acevedo instituted a new camera policy that will do absolutely nothing to curb future incidents. Officers who unintentionally do not turn on their cameras will be suspended for one to three days. If officers leave their cameras off intentionally, they will be suspended for 15 days for the first offense and after the second offense will be fired. If officers intentionally do not turn on their cameras in a “critical situation,” they will be fired.
There’s no way to make a judgment about the officer’s intention, and Acevedo knows this.
Every case will be treated as an “unintentional” offense. What officer would testify otherwise?
Acevedo’s reaction to the shootings shows that he isn’t taking this situation seriously, and that, unquestionably, is a problem.
Likely the Texan would be more happy if the police was the one who was killed.
There are large areas of Austin that need to be contained. Do not send police into these areas.
Spend resources on keeping the criminals in the area or if they come out put them in jail.