Steller: Two officers, two choices — only one right

It was about the conflict between the actions of the two officers closest to the scene.

Officer Daniel Rowan was tailing suspect Mario Valencia, instructing other officers how to approach, when Officer Michael Rapiejko essentially overruled Rowan’s judgment, drove around him and smashed into Valencia.

So who was right?

I went to the site of the Feb. 19 incident Friday with Marana Police Chief Terry Rozema. The wall Rapiejko drove through is still unrepaired, and a dotted line marks the path where Rapiejko veered off the road to strike Valencia. The suspect was hospitalized for two days, then booked into the Pima County jail on several felony charges.

I also called an out-of-state expert to ask for his thoughts about the videos, and about Rowan’s and Rapiejko’s actions.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it before,” said Dennis Kenney, a professor of who focuses on issues of policing at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City.

“As bad as it conceptually feels watching it, I don’t know that the officer (Rapiejko) did anything wrong,” he said. “If it’s legally OK to shoot the guy, then it’s legally OK for him to hit him with the car, particularly if he thinks that’s the best tool to get the job done.”

The more troubling aspect for Kenney, too, was the conflict between the two officers’ approaches.

“If I were in the department, I’d be concerned about it from a procedural standpoint,” he said. “They weren’t working in sync together.”

The video shows Rowan tailing Valencia, as he walks at a fast pace south on North Business Center Drive, past the Harkins movie theater. Rowan stops the squad car and Valencia points the stolen rifle upward at his own neck.

The dash-cam videos are deceiving — you realize this when you arrive at the site — because everything looks farther away on video than it is in real life. So when Rowan yelled at Valencia: “You don’t want to do this! You don’t want to do this!” he was probably only 20 or 30 feet away.

That was too close, Rozema told me Friday. Rowan should have stayed farther back from an armed and agitated man who wasn’t at that moment threatening anyone else, although Rowan wasn’t sure yet that Valencia was the man who allegedly had just stolen a gun and ammunition from the nearby Walmart after a crime spree in Tucson.

The clearest escalation happened when Valencia turned the corner onto Coca-Cola Place. Rowan, following at a greater distance of perhaps 50 feet, yelled at Valencia to “put the gun down! Just put the gun down!” But then a passer-by in a car stopped Rowan to tell him a trigger lock was on the rifle, so it couldn’t be fired.

“Are you sure?” Rowan asked.

You can’t see this in the video, Rozema told me Friday, but it was in the moment when Rowan looked at and spoke with the passer-by when Valencia lowered the gun and pointed it briefly toward Rowan, who didn’t see the motion. If he had seen it, that could have prompted Rowan to shoot.

“He missed some really important cues about this guy’s mind-set and the potential danger that he posed,” Rozema said.

Then Valencia pointed the gun in the air and fired a round off. “Never mind,” the passer-by can be heard saying as Rowan says into the radio, “One round went off into the sky. It’s definitely unlocked, definitely loaded. That means be prepared.”

Rowan continued tailing Valencia as he walked fast down the north side of the street, passing the large, secured gate of the Coca-Cola distribution center on the south side of the street. Fellow officers appeared at the far end of the block as Valencia approached the edge of the Sargent Aerospace parking lot and Rowan warned the officers to stay back.

It was at that moment when Rapiejko drove up behind Rowan. On the video from Rapieljko’s car, you can hear a flicking sound— Rozema said that was Rapiejko unholstering his weapon before deciding he didn’t have a clear, close-enough shot.

Then Rapiejko swerved around Rowan, accelerated forward, and braked as he hit Valencia, who went flying into the air as the patrol car crashed through the wall.

It was an unusual ending under usual police procedures, Kenney said.

“In a situation like this, the officer with the most knowledge, who has the most facts, makes the call,” he told me. “He’d be the one who makes the decision unless he’s relieved of that decision by a supervisor.”

“The second officer (Rapiejko), to the best I can tell, doesn’t even communicate what his intentions are. He simply takes action,” Kenney said. “The second officer is taking a deadly-force decision in apparent conflict with the first officer’s decision, and apparently without all the facts.”

That’s the way it appeared to me, too. It seemed to an outsider like Rowan was managing the situation ably when Rapiejko rashly intervened by passing him.

But when I prodded Rozema for his point of view, he said he thought that Rowan, understandably, got too focused on persuading Valencia to put the gun down while managing the other officers. He also put the situation in the context of the Jan. 8, 2011, mass shooting and officers’ commitment to preventing anything like that from happening again.

“The one who did the best job in this of thinking, big picture, was Mike Rapiejko,” Rozema said.

Before arriving at the scene, Rapiejko had asked dispatchers to call all the neighboring businesses and have them lock their doors, Rozema said. At the scene, there wasn’t a clear shot, but Valencia had already presented a lethal threat by refusing to put down the weapon, pointing it at Rowan and firing in the air.

“It’s a really bad backdrop all the way across,” Rozema said, showing me the different angles. “If you miss with a round here, it’s going downrange into I-10 and all the vehicles. If you’re coming from this angle here, you’re shooting right into Sargent Controls.”

So Rapiejko quickly improvised by using his car to knock down Valencia before he could get near the company’s offices.

It’s possible Rowan’s approach would have worked out better by avoiding any injuries. But if you accept that Valencia had already presented a deadly threat and needed to be stopped before getting closer to more people, Rapiejko’s actions start to seem like the better choice.