Police Shooting

Central Florida law enforcement officers shot and killed 99 people over 10 years, data shows

If you ask Patricia McCain to tell you about her son, she’ll remember him as a kind and faithful man.
“He had just come back from Kentucky where he got saved at his brother’s church. He was a goodhearted person, tried to help other people. Just a happy go-lucky kid.”
Channel 9 investigative reporter Daralene Jones visited McCain in her home on the day that marked one year since Ronald Lawson’s death. The 46-year-old man was shot by Brevard County deputies in January of 2018 after they tried to pull him over for erratic driving.
“I have a lot of unanswered questions," McCain shared with Jones.
Less than one week after the fatal shooting, the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office released the dash camera video showing the moment Lawson was killed. He was sitting in his car. Deputies told internal affairs investigators they tried to pull Lawson over, but he would not comply.
The dash camera video shows the swarm of deputies following closely behind him as he drove on U.S. in Rockledge. Then they laid out the stop sticks, which flattened the tires on Lawson’s car and brought him to a stop.
Jones asked Brevard County Sheriff Wayne Ivey to explain why the deputy shot Lawson as he sat in a parked car.
“When they finally got him stopped he was still in the car and immediately came up with his hands pointing at them, as if someone would if they were pointing a gun at you. And our deputies took action.”
When pressed if the deputies saw Lawson with a gun, Ivey replied, “I believe it was a cellphone.”
9 Investigates spent six months building a database to track officer-involved shootings.
It’s a difficult task because only about 390 of about 400 police and sheriff’s departments report uniform crime data to the state. In supplemental homicide reports, the departments provide case information on officer-involved shootings.
We gathered 10 years worth of data between 2007 and 2017. About 591 cases were reported. That’s an average of 59 a year, or nearly one for each of the 67 counties in Florida. 

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According to our research, 94% of the people shot by law enforcement officers were armed with a gun. The majority of them were handguns. Knives, blunt objects, even unknown objects were used.
We also looked at the age of the offenders. Ronald Lawson was an anomaly. The data showed most people killed by Florida law enforcement officers are under 40. Lawson was 46 years-old. The youngest offender we identified was 15 year-old Zane Terryn. Terryn, also shot in Brevard County, died in 2015 after firing a handgun at Florida Highway Patrol Lt. Channing Taylor. The oldest offender, 80 year-old Isaac Singletary, died in January 2007, shot by undercover officers in the yard of his Jacksonville home.

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When we examined the data we discovered Jacksonville had the most deadly police encounters behind Miami-Dade: 54 and 66, respectively. We counted 99 over the 10 year period across Central Florida. Orange County reported 23, Polk County reported 13 and Brevard County reported 12. The city of Orlando reported 10.
When Daralene Jones spoke with Ivey, she asked him why.
“Ranges in anything from someone with a mental health issue, someone that is enraged over a domestic that has decided they’re going to commit suicide,” Ivey explained, “The deputies have a responsibility to protect the citizens and to protect themselves and the two are equal.”
Ivy continued, “Officer involved shootings are few and far between when you consider the volume of calls.”
The number of calls, depending on the agency and area it patrols, can be in the tens of thousands. For example, data provided by the Orlando Police Department to the City of Orlando and posted to a public website shows OPD took just under 390,000 calls for service in 2017. That's an average of 44.5 calls per hour.
But for Patricia McCain, the circumstances surrounding her son’s death are far more complicated.
“The number of times he was shot was uncalled for,” she told Jones, “I believe 10 shots is a little overkill. He may have been using with his phone and swerved, I don’t know what happened. It was uncalled for. They could’ve got him out of the car, arrested him.”
Jones asked Ivy about de-escalation practices.
“Time can sometimes be our best friend but unfortunately time can be our worst enemy, too,” Ivey said, “the decisions our deputies have to make are made in split seconds. If we can de-escalate we’re going to. If we can use pepper spray or a Taser, we’re going to.”
WFTV obtained a copy of the Orange County Sheriff’s Office "Use of Force" chart. It matches the law enforcement officer’s response to the subject’s behavior, ranging from level 1 through 6.

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"Officers are not responding to an event that's happy for everybody."

Danny Banks is a special agent in charge for the Florid Department of Law Enforcement. He oversees the shooting investigations for every major policy agency in Central Florida with the exception of Brevard County, which is self-policing.
Banks spoke candidly with Daralene Jones about the need for officers to police differently depending on their environment.
“It’s important that our police officers in Central Florida understand the diversity of the people they are serving,” Banks said.
Agencies around the country participate in cultural diversity or sensitivity training designed to build better relationships with the public and in turn they hope they will reduce violence and the need to use force.
“When you send officers into a community and they have no understanding of the culture of those communities or the expectation on their interactions with police, that’s where the problems occur,” Banks told Jones, “Officers are not responding to an event that’s happy for everybody.”
Jones asked Sheriff Ivey about the day Ronald Lawson died.
“His actions certainly indicate that he wanted to commit suicide and that sounds hard to say, but when you look at that video and his actions of pretending to point a gun at deputies,” he continued, “you really have to sit back and say those deputies had to make a decision in split seconds.”
Bank agrees with Ivey on the issue of mental health and believes the state needs to take notice.
“It’s important for them (the officers) to have an understanding that they go in to diffuse the situation rather than escalate it,” he said.
Mental illness is hard to track and we found it is often not learned about until after the shooting. In our own research we were forced to rely on media reports about a shooting to determine if mental illness played a factor.
McCain told Jones her son never received a medical diagnosis of depression, but she knows he suffered.
“It’s nothing I can say or do that’ll bring him back,” she said.