Police Never Announced themselves before they Fired
by James Buchanan
A news article reports “In an emotional news conference, Doug Zerby’s family spoke lovingly of him and decried Long Beach Police officers for opening fire on an unarmed man without every identifying themselves… Long Beach Police Chief Jim McDonnell said his department received a call about a man with a gun around 4:30 Sunday afternoon. They responded to a small apartment complex along Ocean Boulevard in Belmont Shore, a nice section of the city. The chief said his officers sneaked up on Zerby, who appeared intoxicated as he sat on his friend’s stairs. Officers said he pointed what looked like a gun in their direction and they opened fire. It turned out to be a water nozzle with a pistol grip. The chief has disclosed few other details about what happened.”
Doug Zerby was sitting on the porch steps in the backyard of a friend’s apartment waiting for a ride. He had been drinking and didn’t want to drive drunk. Apparently a busy body neighbor -with no life and poor eyesight- called up police and claimed that Zerby had a gun in his hands. The last time I checked, this was America and people had the Right to keep and Bear arms. If someone doesn’t like his neighbor having a gun in his backyard, he should move to England where there’s highly restrictive gun control and only the criminals have guns, not make a call to 911 summoning police and creating a dangerous situation out of nothing.
Part of the 911 call went as follows:
911 Operator: “Long Beach 911, what is the problem?”
Caller: “There’s a guy in my backyard just sitting on the porch and he’s got a gun in his hand.”
911 Operator: “Do you actually see a gun?”
Caller: “Yes I do. It looks like a little tiny six shooter or something like that.”
The busy-body neighbor gave wrong information to the 911 operator and should be held liable in part for the disaster that ensued. The neighbor did NOT “actually see a gun”. He should have said he thought it might be a gun. He LIED to the 911 operator and should be held to the maximum criminal penalty, considering what happened because of the wrong information he supplied. The 911 operator apparently didn’t bother to ask why the neighbor thought the alleged tiny gun was a threat or why he was calling to report a non-crime since possession of a gun in America is NOT a crime. Millions of Americans are paranoid about everything and will call 911 operators over nothing. It’s obvious now that the garden nozzle had very little resemblance to a gun, but the neighbor falsely claimed that he saw a gun, setting off a tragic series of events.
Even taking the neighbor at his word, there are tiny .22 short six-shooters, which are unlikely to hit someone standing more than 30 feet away and with little more force than a pellet gun. It’s unusual for people to have these guns because they’re so worthless, and police should have been open to the possibility that it wasn’t even a gun.
Doug Zerby wasn’t given the opportunity to say anything. The first notice he had that there were police in the area was when he allegedly turned around with the garden nozzle and several police shot him. He didn’t know the police were there. The police never announced themselves, and the police made the mistake of sneaking up close to him, which seems like an incredibly bad procedure for a situation in which a person is suspected of having a pistol.
I place a large portion on the blame on the person who made the inaccurate complaint to 911 that someone had a gun. They share in the guilt for this wrongful death. They didn’t bother to get a good look at the so-called gun which was a BRASS garden nozzle. Pistol barrels are black or nickel. There was still daylight outside at 4:30pm so the neighbor and police should have been able to tell this was NOT a gun if they merely took a good look at it.
In this case the police made a number of mistakes:
1).They failed to determine if there even was a gun. There had never been any report of any gun shots. They could have observed him from a safe distance. If there wasn’t a good vantage point in public, they could have gone to a neighboring apartment building and found a better place to get a view of him.
2).Even if an individual had a gun (especially with White men), it’s not necessarily a bad thing. He may be taking an unloaded gun from his home to his car. He may be cleaning his gun on his porch to keep the fumes out of his apartment. Should the police be allowed to shoot down every White person who happens to flash something that looks like a gun in public? At a minimum, the police should give an American notice that they are in the area and that there’s been a complaint about a possible gun.
3).The police in this case did almost everything wrong. They not only failed to announce themselves, which would have defused the whole situation. They sneaked up on Mr. Zerby which was the worst possible thing to do. They placed themselves within a dangerous range if there were a pistol. And they failed to do enough observation from a safe distance to determine if there even was a gun or what the situation was. Neighbors claim that Zerby was sitting down with his head bobbing, and would likely have dozed off if the police just waited another minute or two.
4).Admittedly the victim was inebriated and he may have been playing around with a garden hose nozzle as if it were a gun, but this has not even been confirmed. It’s only speculation. The police claim that he pointed the nozzle at them may be a lie to cover their butts. Several neighbors were watching the incident and it will be interesting to see if that part of the police report is true or false. Zerby may have merely turned his body around as the police were making noise off to his side.
Zerby probably thought that the brass nozzle he was playing with couldn’t possibly be mistaken for a gun, except he didn’t count on a blind fool neighbor in the apartment building who called 911 and incompetent blundering police with even worse leadership, about to kill him. Admittedly Zerby had a drinking problem, but many people go through a period of alcoholism. Zerby didn’t get a chance to recover thanks to the police. At least that day Zerby was showing some responsibility by not driving. Zerby left behind a girlfriend and an eight year old son. This is one of the worst shooting mistakes by police I’ve ever heard of. I’d like to know how many of the police who shot him were racial quota hires, who had the standards lowered so they could become police.
What’s next? A little blond child with a whistle in his hand getting shot by police?
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A gun does not look like this:
Brass garden hose nozzle.
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And a dangerous gang criminal does not look like this:
This undated photo provided by the family of Douglas Zerby shows Zerby, left, and his then-fiancee Tina.
