Four officer-involved shootings, four departments, one sitting. Jacksonville, San Antonio, Corona, and the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
All four were released in the last few weeks. All four are fatal. No officer was injured in Jacksonville, San Antonio or Corona. In Manhattan, officers were evaluated at a hospital.
Jacksonville, Florida. Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office. Incident August 18, 2026. Footage released September 3, 2026. A sergeant was sitting in a marked patrol car outside a sheriff’s office break station on West Beaver Street — a police building, officers only, not a public substation. A man walked up, the sergeant got out, and the two of them spoke. The man pulled a gun and held it down at his side. The sergeant drew. The man started backing away toward an intersection, then raised the gun and fired. The round missed and struck a building. The sergeant returned fire. Christopher Ford, 45, died at the scene and was never transported. No officer was injured. Crime scene detectives recovered the loaded Glock 19X. Legally this one is not close. The timing is the argument, and the honest answer to how long the sergeant waited is until the gun came up and went off. The round missing is luck, not tactics.
Free — the opening chapterUnits Are SurroundedFive shootings in five months between members of the Soboba Indian Reservation and law enforcement in the Hemet area of Riverside County. My story about being in the middle of it. The full book is coming.Read how it starts
San Antonio, Texas. San Antonio Police Department. Incident August 1, 2026. Footage released September 2, 2026. A neighbor called 911 to report the man next door waving a gun in his front yard, and told dispatch she did not know what was going on with him mentally. Officers found him outside. He said he had a knife; an officer called out that he had a gun. One officer worked him for several minutes — asked him to face away, asked if he remembered him, offered to call his daughter, and told responding units to kill their sirens so it would not agitate him further. He holstered his own weapon and showed his hands while other officers held lethal cover. Then the man reached toward his back pocket with both hands and officers fired. Raul Garza, 69, died at the scene, armed with a handgun. No officer was injured. There is nothing negative to say about this one. Count the chances this man got.
Corona, California. Corona Police Department. Incident July 17, 2026. Footage released by the City of Corona on September 2, 2026. The call was assault with a deadly weapon — a man had struck a 78-year-old woman multiple times with a rock and was armed with a knife. A traffic bureau officer with seven years on arrived by police motorcycle, contacted the 911 callers first, then identified the man on the sidewalk. The man refused every direction, walked straight at him, and pushed the officer’s motorcycle over. The officer kept backing up — police say about 100 feet — and did not fire. Then the man pulled a butcher knife and moved toward the callers, who drove off. The officer fired. Isaiah Maciel, 25, died at the scene. The woman had visible injuries. No officer was injured. This is an extremely clean shooting, and the reason is what the officer did before he fired, not what he did when he fired.
Lower East Side, Manhattan. New York City Police Department. Incident August 16, 2026, at 126 Ludlow Street. The call was a man with a head laceration, and multiple callers reported a slashing. Officers arrived and found a trail of blood on the staircase. As they came up, a man came down at them with a large butcher knife through repeated commands to show his hands and drop it. Rather than hold his position in the middle of the staircase, the officer backed down the stairs and cleared the stairwell. Then officers fired. Wei Chan, 54, died at Bellevue Hospital. The man who had been cut is his father, 75 years old, and he was expected to survive. The butcher knife was recovered. The stairwell is the part worth studying. Watch where the man lands when he goes down — that is exactly where anybody still on those stairs would have come into contact with that knife.
Segments drop daily through the week. The full sitting is above.
Units Are Surrounded
The new book from Ray Dietrich. Five shootings in five months in Riverside County. The full book is coming - read how it starts, free.
