Target Practice: Racism and Police Shootings Are No Game

Since 1996, forty people have been killed by Denver police, out of a total of 86 deadly-force incidents when an officer shot someone. The vast majority of those killed were armed with guns and knives, but other instances involved just a stick, a fake gun, a cell phone or a soda can.  

In July 2004, Officer Ranjan Ford and two other cops used a ladder to climb through the second-story window of an apartment in the South Lincoln Park housing projects. They were searching for Vincent Martinez, who was suspected of assaulting his girlfriend after an argument in a bar, then refusing to let her leave her home for seventeen hours. When they crawled into the dark house, they didn't know that Martinez had already fled out the back and that his uncle, 63-year-old Frank Lobato, was lying naked in bed, unable to walk without crutches.

"I said, 'There's someone on the bed,'" Ford recounted in a videotape, "and before I know it, this guy pops up out of nowhere...just sat straight up and goes, 'What the fuck?' And I saw something shiny in his right hand. And my reaction was to drop down and shoot. I mean, I, I thought I was going to get killed."

Ford said that he mistook a soda can in Lobato's hand for a gun. Although tests didn't find Lobato's fingerprints or saliva on the can, both the Denver District Attorney's Office and a grand jury declined to press charges against Ford. Denver Manager of Safety Al LaCabe concluded that Ford was not justified in the shooting and suspended him for ninety days (later cut to fifty). "I believe there is a reasonable possibility that officer Ford may have simply been startled by Frank Lobato's movements," LaCabe wrote in his 22-page decision letter, "or interpreted those movements as a deadly ambush and momentarily reacted while his finger was on the trigger of the weapon, causing him to unintentionally squeeze the trigger while simultaneously ducking."

That answer didn't satisfy Lobato's family. Attorney Kenneth Padilla filed a $10 million civil-rights lawsuit against the city for "failing to properly hire, train and supervise" the officers who'd responded to the scene; a city attorney fought to get the lawsuit dismissed. This past January, a federal judge ruled that a jury be allowed to hear Padilla's argument that the DPD's failure to train its officers on decisional shooting and use-of-force policy had resulted in Lobato's death. Rather than take its chances at an ugly public trial, the city decided to settle with the Lobato family for $900,000.

"The city paid over a million dollars to defend that case," says Padilla. "They could've settled with this family early on and saved the city a million dollars in taxpayers' money. I think that's obscene."

Padilla also represents Vicky Trujillo, the wife of Jason Gomez.

Tiffany Ito, a social neuroscientist with the CUSP lab, used the shooting simulator to map out the brain activity of citizen volunteers, attaching electrodes to their heads to measure electrical impulses. On her computer screen, she now pulls up a series of charts that detail which parts of the brain were working, and how powerfully they were working, during the milliseconds it took for a shooter image to appear and the participant to decide what to do.

In early studies, Park explains, the scientists would talk about whether only white participants would show cultural bias. "Because then it would have a meaning, right?" she says. "If it was something that whites show and blacks don't, then it is a prejudice of dislike toward black." But that's not what more recent data indicated. "It has less to do with 'I don't like this group' and more to do with 'I associate this group with danger,'" Park notes. "It's certainly part of the culture, given that you see it within African-Americans, and given that they are picking up on more general cultural associations with blacks and danger."

Tom Aveni, a police officer and shooting trainer for thirty years who's studied so-called questionable shootings since 1995, calls the CUSP study "absolute garbage."

"You've got a computer game where they splice a brief exposure of a still photo," he says. "So there's really no realistic situational context. We don't have a crime being committed, we don't have actions."