Pasadena’s Police Oversight Commission Has a Credibility Problem
Malcolm Buchanan Pasadena Comm. Police Oversight Cmsn
Pasadena’s Community Police Oversight Commission was not created to be an anti-police advocacy group. It was created, according to the City’s own description, to “enhance, develop, and strengthen community-police relations,” and to review and make recommendations regarding police department operations. That is a serious public mission. It requires independence, fairness, restraint, and judgment.
The recent officer-involved shooting involving Malcolm Buchanan is a test of whether the commission still understands that mission.
After reading Pasadena Now’s May 15 article and watching the newly released critical incident video, I came away with a question that should concern every Pasadena resident: what exactly is the city getting from this commission if its most vocal members appear to undermine police legitimacy even in a case where officers were responding to an armed suspect who had already shot one person and then shot a police officer?
This was not a random police contact. Officers were dispatched on March 2 to a reported shooting at the Sierra Madre Villa Metro Station. According to Pasadena Police, an arriving officer contacted a gunshot victim and obtained a suspect description. A second victim reported that the first victim had been shot while trying to intervene in a sexual assault. Officers later found someone matching the suspect description a few blocks away. When they attempted to detain him, he fled. During the foot pursuit, officers gave commands to stop. The suspect did not comply. An exchange of gunfire followed, leaving Officer Bryan Vasquez seriously wounded and Buchanan dead.
Pasadena Now reported that Officer Vasquez suffered life-threatening injuries, underwent surgery, spent weeks recovering at Huntington Hospital, and continued to receive medical treatment after being discharged. The case remains under criminal and administrative review.
Those facts should matter.
They should matter before anyone implies racism. They should matter before anyone suggests police malfeasance. They should matter before anyone turns an armed suspect into a symbol and the wounded officer into an afterthought.
Yet Pasadena Now reported that, at the May 14 commission meeting, Chair Esprit Loren Jones said she had attended Buchanan’s memorial service and repast. She also said Buchanan’s mother, grandmother, and father told her they had no contact from the department during the first 45 days. Jones said she had concerns but would save the issue for a later conversation.
Concerns about communication with a deceased person’s family may be fair game. But context matters. Chief Eugene Harris reportedly told the commission that the department issued a letter about the delay, contacted Buchanan’s family, and showed the critical incident video to involved officers and family members, including Buchanan’s family, before public release.
So what exactly is the “issue” of great concern?
A man was shot. Police were called. A suspect description was given. Officers found a man matching that description. He was armed. He ran. A police officer was shot and nearly killed. Officers returned fire. The suspect died.
If the commission chair’s public concern is that the family of the armed suspect felt insufficiently contacted, that issue may be worth clarifying. But it cannot be treated as morally equivalent to the actual sequence of public danger that brought police there in the first place. Nor should the chair of the city’s police oversight body appear publicly aligned with the family narrative of a man who shot a police officer before the investigation is complete.
Compassion is not the problem. A family can grieve even when their loved one did terrible things. Mental illness may help explain behavior, but it does not erase the threat Buchanan posed that night. The police officer did not have the luxury of conducting a clinical diagnosis during a foot pursuit involving an armed shooting suspect. He had a duty to protect the public. Based on the video and public reporting, he attempted to do exactly that --- and was nearly killed for it.
That is why the optics of the commission chair attending Buchanan’s memorial service matter. Not because private compassion is forbidden. Not because the dead man’s family should be treated cruelly. But because public officials with oversight authority must avoid the appearance of prejudgment. When a commission chair appears closer to the family of the suspect than to the wounded officer or the public endangered by the suspect’s actions, the commission’s neutrality suffers.
If the commission chair believed it was appropriate to attend Buchanan’s memorial service and repast, one wonders whether she made any comparable effort to visit Officer Vasquez in the hospital or express concern to his family. Perhaps she did. If so, the public should know that. But if the only visible gesture of personal solidarity went toward the family of the man who shot the officer, then the problem is not compassion. The problem is imbalance.
And neutrality is the whole ballgame.
A fair police oversight system should do two things at once: hold officers accountable when misconduct is proven, and protect them when false, exaggerated, or unsubstantiated accusations are used to destroy reputations. The ugly truth is that some civilians do make knowingly false complaints. Others make mistaken ones. Some complaints are driven by anger, leverage, politics, or litigation strategy. If a civilian review board helps push stigmatizing claims into public view without adequate proof, that is not transparency. It is reputational punishment without due process.
The same problem exists when commissioners treat disparity as proof of discrimination. RIPA data can identify patterns worth examining. It can raise questions. But it does not, by itself, prove racial animus by officers. Yet in Pasadena, discussions of police stops too often seem to begin from the assumption that disparity equals racism and police activity is inherently suspect.
I saw that problem firsthand during my brief tenure on the commission. At one meeting, a professor presented a taxpayer-funded report that implied Pasadena police were engaging in disparate treatment toward Black and Hispanic residents. The report magnified a disparity by an order of ten. When I questioned the math, he answered, “Oh, I guess you read the report,” and admitted the error. But the error was never publicly corrected with the same visibility as the original accusation.
That matters. Public perception is shaped by official-sounding presentations, headlines, commission discussions, and selective outrage. When the accusation is loud and the correction is silent, the damage remains.
This problem also predates the Buchanan shooting. When I joined the commission as a retired LAPD officer, Pasadena Now reported that Chair Jones remarked, “We’ve got a groove that is being a bit disrupted.” A public commenter said, “I’m definitely keeping my eyes on you. I know you’re LAPD retired.” In isolation, perhaps those comments could be brushed off as ordinary skepticism. In context, they reflect a deeper problem: law enforcement experience was treated less like useful knowledge and more like contamination.
That attitude is poisonous if the commission’s mission is truly to strengthen community-police relations.
Police officers can accept scrutiny. They live with scrutiny every day: body cameras, supervisors, internal affairs, prosecutors, civil litigation, media coverage, public records laws, and now civilian oversight. What they should not have to accept is a city-sponsored process in which some commissioners appear to approach police work with open cynicism and ideological suspicion.
That has a cost.
It costs morale. It costs recruitment. It costs retention. It costs public safety when officers begin to wonder whether the city they serve will stand behind them even when the facts show they acted courageously. It costs taxpayers when litigation is encouraged by public officials who seem eager to validate one side before the investigation is complete. And it costs social cohesion when residents are repeatedly told, directly or indirectly, that their police department is racist, corrupt, or murderous without proof.
Oversight done well is valuable. Oversight done poorly is worse than useless. It inflames distrust while claiming to build trust. It demoralizes officers while claiming to improve policing. It gives activists a platform while giving the public the illusion of balanced review.
Pasadena does not need a commission that reflexively defends the police. That would defeat the purpose. But it also does not need one that reflexively distrusts them.
The city needs commissioners credible enough to criticize officers when they are wrong, disciplined enough to wait for facts before implying wrongdoing, and honest enough to defend officers when the evidence shows they acted lawfully and bravely.
The Buchanan shooting should have been a moment of moral clarity. A wounded victim. A fleeing armed suspect. A police officer nearly killed in the line of duty. A tragic death, yes, but one caused by a chain of violent conduct that officers were duty-bound to confront.
If Pasadena’s oversight commission cannot distinguish that from police misconduct, then the city has a bigger problem than one controversial meeting.
It has an oversight commission that may no longer be serving the purpose for which it was created.
Good outcomes are built long before the moment of truth
Design based on LAPD training bulletin concepts
Reviewing Critical-force Incidents
Across the country, the review of police deadly force is moving beyond the old question of whether an officer faced danger at the precise instant force was used. California has already codified that movement. Penal Code section 835a now states that deadly force should be used only when necessary, in defense of human life, and officers are expected to consider available resources and techniques when reasonably safe and feasible.
The courts are moving in the same direction. In Barnes v. Felix, the United States Supreme Court rejected the narrow “moment of threat” rule, holding that Fourth Amendment force reviews must consider the totality of the circumstances, including relevant events leading up to the use of force. California reached a similar destination under state negligence law in Hayes v. County of San Diego, where the California Supreme Court held that liability may arise from tactical conduct and decisions preceding deadly force if, under the totality of the circumstances, those decisions made the use of force unreasonable.
That does not mean every bad outcome is proof of bad tactics. It does mean reviewers should resist the old habit of looking only at the final seconds.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s Command and Control training bulletin offers a practical way to conduct that broader review. The bulletin defines Command and Control as active leadership used to direct personnel, coordinate resources, accomplish tasks, and minimize risk. It also identifies PATROL as a tool for establishing Command and Control: Planning, Assessment, Time, Redeployment and/or Containment, Other Resources, and Lines of Communication.
Planning asks a basic question: did anyone take charge? In a critical incident, planning may be imperfect and compressed. Nobody should expect a field officer to produce a conference-room strategy while a person is armed, unstable, or violent. But there still needs to be direction. Who identified the problem? Who assigned roles? Who decided whether officers should hold, move, contain, communicate, evacuate, or deploy less-lethal options? A scene full of officers is not the same thing as a managed response.
Assessment requires reviewers to look at what officers knew, what they reasonably perceived, and what they should have been processing as the incident unfolded. Was the subject armed? Was the weapon being used against others, displayed, concealed, or merely reported? Were there victims nearby? Was the person suicidal, assaultive, fleeing, barricaded, or confused? Were officers dealing with a static problem or a rapidly deteriorating one? Good assessment is not hindsight. It is disciplined attention to the facts available at the time.
Time may be the most misunderstood factor. Time is valuable when it exists. It allows officers to slow the pace, create distance, bring in supervision, establish communication, deploy less-lethal tools, and reduce confusion. But time is not always available. A suspect actively stabbing someone, pointing a firearm, or closing distance with a deadly weapon can collapse decision-making into seconds. The fair question is not, “Could officers have waited?” The better question is, “Was time reasonably available, and if so, did officers use it to reduce the need for force?”
Redeployment and containment focus on officer positioning. Did officers move to cover? Did they create distance? Did they avoid crowding the subject? Did they contain movement and protect the public? Poor positioning can manufacture urgency. Better positioning can lower the temperature. It can also reduce the number of officers who believe they must use deadly force at the same time.
Other resources asks whether officers considered the tools and personnel available to them. That may include less-lethal options, shields, K-9, air support, crisis negotiators, mental health teams, additional supervisors, medical personnel, or specialized units. But resources are not magic either. They must be feasible, timely, and relevant. Calling for a resource that cannot arrive in time may look good in a report, but it may not change the reality on the ground. By contrast, when a resource is reasonably foreseeable, available, and important to a planned event, failing to secure it may be a legitimate basis for critique.
Lines of communication are often where incidents succeed or fail. Command does not begin when a supervisor arrives; it begins when someone on scene takes responsibility for organizing the response. Even in a two-officer patrol car, one officer needs to function as the lead voice. In single-officer deployments, the first officer with sufficient situational awareness — whether the primary officer or the senior officer present — should clearly establish who is managing the incident until relieved. Was one officer giving commands, or were several officers shouting different orders? Did responding units know who was in command? Were assignments clear? Was the radio traffic useful? Were officers communicating with the subject in a way that helped, or were they adding noise?
PATROL does not turn force review into a search for perfection. Police officers still face dangerous, unstable, and fast-moving events. Some uses of deadly force are necessary despite sound tactics.
But PATROL does force the right questions. Was there leadership? Was there assessment? Was time used when available? Were officers positioned wisely? Were resources considered? Were communications clear?
That is the proper direction of modern police force review. Good outcomes are built long before the moment of truth.
Do Police Tactics Leading Up to Force Matter?
Police use-of-force analysis often focuses on the moment force is applied. However, the events leading up to that moment can play a significant role in how an encounter unfolds.
Tactical decisions such as approach speed, positioning, coordination, and containment can either create time and control or compress the encounter and reduce available options. When time and distance are limited, officers may be required to make rapid decisions under uncertain conditions.
In some cases, these tactical choices can influence whether force becomes necessary. A controlled approach may preserve alternatives, while a compressed encounter may increase the likelihood that force will be used.
Courts and experts increasingly examine the totality of the circumstances, including these pre-force decisions. As a result, the analysis of tactics is often central to understanding both the reasonableness and necessity of force.
For attorneys, this broader perspective provides a more complete understanding of how police encounters develop and how they are evaluated in litigation.
Can Police Force Be Reasonable but Still Unnecessary?
Police use of force is often evaluated under the standard of objective reasonableness. However, an increasingly important question in civil litigation is whether the force used was not only reasonable, but necessary.
In many cases, the analysis does not begin at the moment force is applied. It begins with the tactical decisions that led up to the encounter. Decisions involving time, distance, containment, and communication can shape whether a situation escalates into a use-of-force event.
A use of force may be considered reasonable based on the information available to an officer at the moment it was used. At the same time, questions may arise as to whether earlier decisions limited available alternatives or contributed to a rapidly evolving situation.
This distinction is particularly relevant in civil cases, where the totality of the circumstances includes not only the final seconds, but the sequence of events leading up to the use of force.
For attorneys evaluating these cases, understanding both reasonableness and necessity provides a more complete framework for analyzing liability and officer decision-making.
Policing Is Thinking
Part I: How closing car doors can prevent pursuits, shootings, and avoidable uses of force
Ken Aston, the legendary soccer referee, once said, “Refereeing is thinking.”
He meant that good refereeing is not merely reacting after the foul. The best referees read the game. They study body language. They sense frustration building. They recognize trouble before it happens and take small steps early to keep the match from becoming unmanageable.
The same is true in policing: Policing is thinking.
Good police work is not simply reacting to danger after it appears. It is evaluating what is happening, sizing up what may happen next, recognizing complications before they develop, and taking reasonable steps to keep a manageable situation from becoming a crisis.
One simple traffic-stop tactic deserves serious discussion: when a driver or passenger is removed from a vehicle, officers should consider getting the door closed behind that person, as long as it is safe and lawful to do so.
The open-door problem
Officers are trained to watch hands, maintain distance, use contact-and-cover, avoid crossfire, and control positioning. Those principles matter. But the vehicle itself can become the central problem.
A vehicle is not just transportation. During a traffic stop, it may also be a source of weapons, a means of escape, a place to conceal evidence, a barrier, or a weapon.
Two police shootings will illustrate my point, but they are only two of dozens across the country.
Daunte Wright: a minor stop that became a deadly-force incident
The death of Wright in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, illustrates the issue.
Daunte Wright was stopped for traffic and equipment violations in Brooklyn Center, MN, in 2021. During the stop, officers learned he had an outstanding warrant and attempted to arrest him. Wright resisted, broke away, and got back into the driver’s seat through the left open door. The senior officer said she intended to use her Taser but fired her handgun instead, killing Wright. She was later convicted of manslaughter.
No one can honestly say closing the door would have prevented the shooting. But the case shows how quickly a relatively minor traffic stop can collapse once a noncompliant driver has a path back into the vehicle.
Once Wright got back into the driver’s seat, the situation shifted from arrest-and-control to possible vehicle flight, a moving car, and a rapidly collapsing tactical situation.
A closed door could have changed the timing and trajectory of the encounter. It might have made reentry harder. It might have bought time. It might have defeated Wright’s impulse or incentive to resist.
Policing is thinking means recognizing that the open door is not neutral. Open, it gives the driver an option. Sometimes that option becomes the whole case.
Russell Douthit: when the vehicle remains a threat
A 2022 LAPD Harbor Division shooting presents a different but related problem.
Two LAPD Harbor Division officers detained a car in San Pedro containing four occupants outside a liquor store. Russell Douthit was seated in the left rear passenger seat. After establishing reasonable suspicion, officers removed occupants one at a time. When an officer ordered out Douthit, he left objects on the seat. During a pat-down, the officer recovered a loaded handgun from Douthit’s waistband.
At that point, the tactical situation changed. Having found one gun, with another passenger still in the car, the officer stopped searching, backed away, and requested backup.
The officers ordered Douthit to his knees near the open rear door. He was not handcuffed. Officers gave him commands to move away from the passenger compartment. Instead, Douthit lunged into the back seat with both hands and came back out holding a dark object. An officer fired one round, striking Douthit in the hand. The object turned out to be a cell phone. The District Attorney later found the shooting justified. No argument there.
The point is tactical
Once a handgun had been recovered from Douthit’s waistband, the officers were in a high-risk situation, waiting for backup. Because the door issue had not been closed when Douthit was removed, it was now too late to address it safely. Douthit was not handcuffed, within arm’s reach of the open car, and only he knew what was in the back seat. One gun has already been removed from his waistband.
A closed door could have changed the encounter. At minimum, it would have slowed or limited Douthit’s ability to reenter the vehicle.
The facts in the two cases are different, but the lesson is the same: the vehicle is not neutral if the suspect can still get into it.
Best practice: close the door
When a driver or occupant is lawfully directed out of a vehicle, officers should consider instructing that person to close the door behind him, assuming it can be done safely.
Good tactics often work by removing options before they become threats.
Not every door in every case must be closed. Tactics are situational. Sometimes an officer may want the door open to see inside the vehicle. Sometimes he may need to preserve evidence, monitor another occupant, or avoid putting the suspect’s hands near the door. Sometimes closing the door creates a worse problem than leaving it open.
So, the point is not: always close every door.
The point is: think about the door.
What does the open door give this person? Can he get back into the driver’s seat? Are the keys in the vehicle? Can he reach a weapon? Can he reach property, clothing, or a phone that may complicate the encounter? Can another occupant slide into the driver’s seat? Will the open door incentivize flight or resistance?
These questions are the essence of policing as thinking.
Objective reasonableness is not just the moment of force
Too many use-of-force discussions focus entirely on the final second: the lunge, the reach, the movement, the shot. The final second matters. But it is not the whole case.
In Barnes v. Felix, the Supreme Court rejected the narrow “moment of threat” approach and reaffirmed that excessive-force analysis must consider the totality of the circumstances, not merely the instant force was used.
That does not mean every tactical imperfection makes a later use of force unreasonable. Police work is not performed in a classroom. Officers deal with uncertainty, poor lighting, incomplete information, stress, resistance, traffic, bystanders, and rapidly changing behavior.
But earlier decisions matter.
Where was the suspect placed? Was he left near an open vehicle door? Was he handcuffed? Was he moved away from the passenger compartment? Was the vehicle still accessible? Had officers already discovered a weapon? Was the suspect given an easy route back to the source of danger?
This is not officer gotcha. They are the questions serious trainers, supervisors, investigators, and attorneys should ask.
Not Monday-morning quarterbacking
Some will say it’s obvious watching a video, but in my 33 years in law enforcement I never heard this point made, let alone stressed or included in a curriculum.
Fair enough. Video review is not the same as standing on asphalt at night, dealing with a resistant suspect, multiple occupants, poor lighting, and incomplete information. But training exists because officers do not get perfect conditions.
The point is not to criticize every officer who leaves a door open. The point is to identify a repeated pattern and ask whether a small tactical habit could reduce risk.
The issue is easy to overlook, and it is easy to fix.
Policy and training
Agencies should consider adding door-control concepts to traffic-stop training, pursuit-prevention training, and use-of-force review. It may be as simple as making officers more aware and asking the right questions.
“Did you leave the door open for a reason?”
Sometimes the answer will be yes. Sometimes it will be no. Either answer is useful because it forces the officer to think tactically and sets the expectation they will be asked.
A reasonable training principle might say:
When a driver or occupant is removed from a lawfully stopped vehicle, officers should consider whether the open vehicle door creates a risk of reentry, flight, weapon access, or destruction of evidence. When safe and lawful, officers should consider directing the occupant to close the door, moving the occupant away from the vehicle, or otherwise controlling access to the passenger compartment. These actions should be based on officer safety, scene control, and deescalation.
That language preserves officer judgment. It does not pretend every stop is the same. It simply reminds officers to treat the vehicle as part of the tactical environment.
It’s not overthinking, it’s smart policing. Policing is thinking.
In Part II, I will address a related but legally more sensitive issue: whether officers should ask drivers to turn off the vehicle and voluntarily hand over the keys or key fob during certain traffic stops. The tactical value is obvious, but the legal and policy questions deserve separate treatment.
Cops Aren’t Perfect—But Are They Exceptional?
Cops aren’t perfect, but are they exceptional?
In a policing class I once taught, I played Paul Harvey’s famous broadcast “What is a Policeman?” A student quickly challenged Harvey’s central point. He argued that police officers are not morally superior to the rest of society, pointing instead to corruption and misconduct. His challenge was fair. Police are not immune from failure, and when they do fail, it erodes trust. But his comment sent me home to do some digging. What I found was striking.
In fact, data compiled from multiple studies suggest that police officers are arrested at significantly lower rates than the general public. One study found that the annual arrest rate for officers nationally was about 0.72 per 1,000 officers—orders of magnitude lower than the adult male population overall. By contrast, the arrest rate for National Football League players—a group often admired for their discipline and success—is nearly 1,000 times higher (Stinson 2013). Police officers, it seems, are not immune to crime, but they are a statistical outlier in how rarely they are arrested compared to others.
Consider the comparison. Both policing and professional football are high-status, high-visibility careers. Both demand discipline, resilience, and the ability to perform under pressure. Yet the record of criminal misconduct could not be more different. Professional athletes, often emerging from lower socio-economic backgrounds, achieve sudden wealth and fame that, rather than insulating them from criminal behavior, sometimes enables it. Police officers, by contrast, often come from those same neighborhoods—barrios, ghettos, and working-class blocks. Some choose gangs, some choose policing. The difference is not circumstance, but choice.
What makes police officers exceptional is not that they are free of flaws but that they are carefully selected, tested, and trained from among tens of thousands who apply. When I served as a sergeant at the academy, only two recruits out of every 100 applicants survived the hiring gauntlet and probationary period. The vetting process alone sets officers apart from the general population in terms of character, temperament, and resilience.
The student in my class was right to raise the issue of police misconduct. His skepticism mirrors how many think today. True, corruption cases do exist, and they erode trust when they occur. But statistical and human evidence shows something else: Paul Harvey’s intuition about police officers was right. Decades before the studies, Harvey sensed—as did most of society—that officers were not average men and women in uniform, but an outlier group who, despite their flaws, stood apart from society in their resilience and integrity. So, when I returned to class I told the young man and the class: “Cops aren’t perfect, but they are exceptional.”
References
Stinson, Philip M., and John Liederbach. “Fox in the Henhouse: A Study of Police Officers Arrested for Crimes.” Criminal Justice Policy Review 24, no. 5 (2013): 601–625.
Harvey, Paul. “What is a Policeman?” Radio broadcast, 1970. Transcript available via The Paul Harvey Archives.
Insights on Police Practices, Use of Force, and Case Analysis
This section provides analysis and commentary on issues commonly encountered in criminal and civil cases involving police conduct, including use of force, investigative practices, and officer decision-making.
Topics include:
Use-of-force analysis under evolving legal standards
Tactical decision-making and its impact on outcomes
Review of police reports, video evidence, and witness accounts
Common investigative and procedural issues that arise in litigation
The role of perception, stress, and human performance in rapidly evolving encounters
The focus is on practical, real-world application—how incidents unfold, how they are evaluated, and how they are presented in litigation.
Content is intended for attorneys and others seeking a clearer understanding of police practices beyond general or theoretical discussion.
New articles are added periodically addressing emerging legal standards, case law developments, and practical issues in police use-of-force and investigative analysis.