ORANGE COUNTY VOICES LAW ENFORCEMENT : Police Shooting Showed Reckless Disregard of Public : A review is needed on policy that led to a drug bust at a place and time when schoolchildren were likely to be present.

On April 5 and 6, the Los Angeles Times reported that a Latino man, Jesus Ramos Gonzalez, had been shot to death by Orange police at a 7-Eleven convenience store on the corner of Williams and Main streets in Tustin.

According to the reports, the shooting occurred immediately following a planned police drug buy. Ramos Gonzalez sold drugs to an undercover police officer; he got in his truck, which was parked in the 7-Eleven parking lot, and began to back out of his parking space.

Other officers operating as backup apparently shouted at him to stop; he did not. Before Ramos Gonzalez got out of the parking lot, one of the officers shot through the windshield of the truck four times, killing him. Sources reported that Ramos Gonzalez was unarmed. The shooting took place on a Wednesday (April 4) sometime between 1:30 and 2 in the afternoon. Since April 6, there has been no further reporting on the incident.

Yet this shooting, perhaps a minor event in the war on drugs, has remained a destructive part of my life.

More than once since then I have been awakened deep in the night by the screams of my 6-year-old daughter. I go into her room and find her seated upright in her bed, sweating, her eyes bulging and darting sharply from side to side. Her nightmare is recurrent: “Daddy, I was at the 7-Eleven with Toyin and Amanda (two of her school friends). We were talking and the policeman came and said we shouldn’t be there and he shot Toyin. And then he was mad at me and he shot me and we were bleeding and we died.”

My daughter has this nightmare because she and a number of her first-grade schoolmates nearly witnessed the shooting of Ramos Gonzalez on their way home from school.

The 7-Eleven where the police set up the drug buy is just down the street--perhaps 200 yards--from Heidemann Elementary School, which my daughter attends. Across the street from the 7-Eleven are the Park Place Apartments, a large family-oriented apartment complex where my daughter and I live, along with scores of children who attend the Heidemann school. The sidewalk from the apartment to the school passes right by the 7-Eleven parking lot. It is filled with schoolchildren during the morning hour before school and in the afternoon when school lets out at 1:55 p.m. My daughter was coming home from school with her baby-sitter at the time of the shooting. They both saw the victim lying face down in the parking lot, in a pool of blood, with his hands handcuffed behind his back.

How is it possible that the police would intentionally set up a drug buy/bust and contemplate firing their weapons, in such close proximity to an elementary school at a time when children would be passing by?

For the police to plan this action at such risk to innocent children violates our basic values of community safety. In this instance, no bystanders were killed or maimed, but it is clear that the police acted in reckless disregard of the potential for harm. Under California law, such recklessness, when it is “so extreme as to exceed all bounds of that usually tolerated in a civilized community,” establishes an element of civil liability. And under federal law, the conscious disregard of substantial risk of harm to innocent parties establishes a significant part of a federal claim for violation of civil rights.

The relevant municipal and county authorities would be well advised to review their drug bust policies and training methods. If this disregard for the safety of schoolchildren is unaddressed and permissible under municipal policy, the city itself may become liable for callously planned drug operations.

This shooting also raises a question of equal protection under law for all citizens. My daughter and I are African-American. A good number of the people who live in our apartment complex and use the Heidemann School are people of color. I chose to send my daughter to that school mainly so that we could be around other people of color: she has an African-American first grade teacher, one of only two in all of Orange County, and an African-American principal.

I cannot help but feel that had the police been operating in Irvine or Newport Beach they would have been more aware of the proximity of a school and the time of day. I am concerned that the authorities have not adequately considered the security of schoolchildren in their planning of potentially violent drug operations.

The ongoing investigation into this incident must review not only the killing of an apparently unarmed man but also the planning of an arranged drug buy at such a time and place.