By Mary Shelton

Community leaders and residents congregated at the meeting of the Community Police Review Commission on May 30 to protest the board's assertion that a Riverside Police Department officer acted within policy when he shot and killed a Black mentally ill man last year.

Jennifer Vaughn Blakely

Commissioner Jim Ward, the only African-American on the panel, cast the sole dissenting vote and told the other commissioners that he was going to issue a minority report on the shooting because he believed that based on the evidence, Ellefson had used excessive force when he shot Brown. 

Community leaders urged the commission and the city to allow the public equal access to both reports issued in relation to the shooting.

"It would be unethical and nontransparent to not give equal consideration to the minority report," said Jennifer Vaughn-Blakeley who chairs the Group.

Waudier Rucker Hughes

Several community leaders objected to those statements, including Waudier Rucker-Hughes, who chairs the Riverside chapter of the NAACP.

"That's a slippery slope that perhaps you don't want to go down," Rucker-Hughes said.

According to statements issued as part of the investigation conducted by the CPRC's investigator, the six civilian witnesses interviewed did not see anything in Brown's hand when he was shot. Their eyewitness accounts contrasted with statements given by the two officers onscene that Brown was holding a taser and aiming it at the officers.

The commissioners did agree that Brown was likely sitting or squatting on the ground when Ellefson shot him.

All but one of the civilian witnesses and Officer Michael Paul Stucker had said that Brown had been sitting, squatting or kneeling when he had been shot and a trajectory analysis conducted by Applied Graphic Sciences agreed. According to statements made on Ellefson's belt recording, both officers had commented to other officers onscene that both shot fired by Ellefson had been at a downward trajectory.

Former CPRC chair and retired police chief, Bill Howe also addressed the commission with his concerns about the shooting and the investigations that came afterward.

"I'll support you when you're right and be unhappy with you when I think you're wrong," Howe said.

Howe criticized what he and others called the mishandling of the DNA evidence, which according to a supplementary report included in the latest draft of the CPRC report had been collected from both the stock and the handle of the taser on one single swab. According to a report by the State Department of Justice, Brown had been listed as a possible DNA donor and the two officers were excluded from the donor pool. At least one other DNA sample found on the taser was not identified.

Howe expressed concerns about the interviews of officers done by the department's investigators that included asking leading questions of the officers involved in the shooting during past investigations.

"We've been down this road many times," Howe said.

The CPRC has also been down a long road, having been subjected to what many community members have said is a campaign by the city to render it less effective in the wake of three fatal officer-involved shootings last year.  Since late 2005, the city has been sued five times in connection with four officer-involved deaths, all of them also investigated by the CPRC.