Southland Police Examine Tactics in Wake of Shooting

An Oxnard SWAT team leader’s fatal shooting of a fellow officer has prompted experts in special tactics throughout Southern California to examine their own procedures to prevent such a tragedy from happening again.

“We obviously will be in touch with them for purposes of evaluating the situation and seeing what could have been done differently,” said Lt. Ray Baytos, who directs special weapons and tactics training for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

In Oxnard, a day after Officer James Rex Jensen Jr. was shot during a drug raid by his mentor, veteran Sgt. Daniel Christian, officials were poring over details of the devastating accident.

The raid, on a condominium in a residential neighborhood near the Port Hueneme Navy base, was part of a sweep of 16 dwellings and businesses in five cities that concluded a two-year investigation.

The examination of what went wrong came as plans were being made for a funeral in Ventura on Monday that is expected to draw 2,000 to 3,000 police and well-wishers from across the state. A principal focus of the inquiry is Jensen’s actions as he led a 12-officer team into a suspected drug dealer’s Oxnard condominium, up a staircase and into a hallway, where he was shot.

Officials are also reevaluating the wisdom of an assault plan that required Jensen to hurl a deafening, smoky “flash-bang” diversionary grenade in the hallway just seconds before Christian fired the fatal shotgun blasts.

Assistant Oxnard Police Chief Stan Myers, who oversees the SWAT unit, said it will be weeks before the department rules on the causes of the shooting.

But Myers said he suspects that Jensen may have committed “an error in procedure” that contributed to his death.

Officials said the young officer was shot up to three times in the side of his chest shortly after he threw the diversionary grenade from the staircase, raced into the hallway and then an adjacent bedroom--only to quickly return to a hall doorway.

Although only a few feet away, Christian could not identify his partner--a close friend and protege--through the smoke, and mistook him for an armed suspect, officials said.

A major question, Myers said, is why Jensen did not stay in the bedroom and hold that position because there were plenty of officers to search the rest of small, two-bedroom condominium.

Cmdr. John Crombach, who directed Wednesday’s raids in his city, said Jensen should have stayed in the first room. “The plan didn’t call for Jim to come out,” he said. “I don’t know why [he did], and unfortunately I don’t think we’re ever going to know that.”

Crombach said Jensen made a second apparent error in judgment by moving too quickly up the staircase and leaving Christian, his partner in a two-man “cell” that was supposed to work as a team. That quick movement severed visual and verbal contact, Crombach said.

Crombach said a third problem may have been the use of the grenade in such close quarters.

“This is an excellent tool. We know what it does. And the everyday crooks on the street do not know,” he said. “But smoke is emerging to be an issue here. We may have to do some reevaluation of instruments used under those circumstances.”

Even as Oxnard grieved its loss, other Southern California police agencies considered the lessons of the rare incident in which an officer shot an officer.

SWAT supervisor Baytos of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which trains officers from Oxnard and other departments, said he did not know what went wrong. But the key question is whether Jensen and Christian followed their assault plan.

“They probably had a working knowledge of what the interior of the place looked like. Oftentimes, we will even plan our movements,” he said. “I’m sure all of that was in place in Oxnard, because they have a very good reputation.”

Baytos also noted the disorienting effects of the “flash-bang” grenade. “They are very bight and very loud and the smoke is dense, so it can disorient not only the suspect but the officer. So you have to be very circumspect in deploying them.”

The Ventura County shooting shocked and disturbed many experienced Los Angeles police officers, who tried to fathom how the involved officers’ tactics could have gone so tragically awry. Some called to express condolences to the Oxnard department, and many puzzled over the known facts of the incident.

According to some officers, the Oxnard team’s use of flash-bang explosive devices should not have led to confusion and disorientation by the police. “If they’re well-trained and conversant with their equipment, that shouldn’t happen,” one officer said.

Several officers emphasized that in the heat of an incident, events happen with stunning speed. Decisions have to be made instantaneously, often in smoky or poorly lit rooms amid extraordinary confusion and danger.

“When things happen, they happen so quickly,” said one Los Angeles police officer. “We expect humans to act in nanoseconds, and then we spend months trying to figure out what went wrong.”

The shooting of Jensen was only the second fatal incident involving one officer shooting another in Southern California in this decade.

The other was an Orange County sheriff’s deputy who was shot by a fellow officer during an impromptu training exercise on Christmas Day, 1993, an incident that also served as a costly lesson on safety to local law enforcement agencies.

In the months following the death of Deputy Darryn Leroy Robins, police agencies reexamined and reemphasized their policies regarding firearms and field training.

The shooting by Brian P. Scanlan, a field training deputy who has since retired, sparked allegations of gross misconduct and racism because Scanlan is white and Robins was African American. The Orange County Grand Jury and the U.S. Justice Department found no criminal wrongdoing.

Scanlan was placed on paid leave after the shooting and was granted a service-connected disability retirement in January 1995.

The county has proposed settling wrongful death claims, filed by Robins’ wife, his 3-year-old daughter and his mother, with an agreement that could pay the family nearly $5 million over their lifetimes.

Times staff writers Jim Newton in Los Angeles and Anna Cekola in Orange County contributed to this story.