DA to Stop Investigating Shootings by Officers

Every time a law enforcement officer shoots someone in Sacramento County, the district attorney’s office tries to make sure the shooting was justified.

It’s been this way for decades, but that voluntary watchdog aspect of the district attorney’s office will soon be lost to budget cuts, Sacramento County District Attorney Jan Scully said this week.

She said her office, struggling with a $6.9 million budget deficit, and eliminate many key functions, including the investigation of officer-involved shootings and inmate deaths—like the shooting of 32-year-old John Hesselbein by an Elk Grove police officer .

That would leave only the individual law enforcement agencies to investigate themselves, as well as the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, which also looks into all officer-involved shootings in the county.

“It’s not necessarily a good thing to have an agency investigating itself, which is what you have [if the district attorney’s office stops],” Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Marv Stern said in a phone interview.

Stern, who has investigated officer-involved shootings for the past five years, said it’s very rare that the district attorney finds a shooting was unjustified and files charges against an officer. The last time it happened in Sacramento County was “in excess of 15 years ago,” he said, unable to provide any further details.

Stern said officer-involved shootings, which usually total 10 to 15 a year in the county, all have something in common: “The police did everything to try not to shoot until they had to shoot. It’s really a last resort kind of thing for them.”

Still, Stern says there’s value for law enforcement agencies to have an independent review. If the shooting is justified, the police will have the district attorney’s report to back up their actions.

The district attorney’s office reports are usually about five pages but can take months to compile, Stern said. In last year’s Arden Way standoff that ended with officers shooting and killing a suspect, district attorney investigators had to review thousands of pages of reports, videos and other evidence before issuing a finding, he said.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department review process is also no small task. Official department policies, attached above as a PDF file, dictate the response for any officer-involved shooting. The officer’s firearm must be sent to a crime lab for analysis and homicide detectives must interview those involved. Throughout the process, the department has strict rules about who can discuss the incident and who can and can’t be present during formal interviews.

Spokesman Dep. Jason Ramos said the sheriff’s department reviews all shootings by other agencies in the county and can recommend action to the district attorney’s office, but it’s unknown how that might change in the future.