Forty minutes. A crisis negotiator. A behavioral therapist. Two languages. Every de-escalation tool a department has. And it still ends in gunfire. Here’s why.
Palm Springs officers responded around 3:41 p.m. on May 28 to the 1200 block of East Palm Canyon Drive after a caller reported a man acting erratically and threatening employees at a motel with a knife. A drone from the department’s Real Time Intelligence Center located the man on a second-story balcony, pacing with the knife still in his hand. He was later identified as Gilberto Flores of Desert Hot Springs.
Officers didn’t rush this. For more than 40 minutes, a trained crisis negotiator and the department’s Community Behavioral Assessment Team worked to talk Flores down, speaking to him in both English and Spanish. Every resource a department has for exactly this kind of call was on scene and working the problem.
Then Flores came off the balcony and moved directly toward officers, still holding the knife. Officers repositioned to create distance, buying themselves room and time. Flores kept advancing, working his way to the passenger side of a patrol car. Officers deployed two tasers and a 40mm less-lethal sponge round, trying to end this without a shooting. None of it worked. Flores raised the knife and charged.
This is where distance matters, and it’s worth explaining because people don’t understand why officers can’t just wait until a knife is inches away. Getting shot doesn’t drop a person instantly. It takes hits, then a body slowly goes down, and in the time that takes, someone with a knife can still close five, ten, twenty feet and finish what they started. At close range, a knife is every bit as lethal as a firearm, and there is no version of “wait and see” that keeps an officer alive against a charging suspect with a blade in hand.
Three officers fired, striking Flores. He was transported to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. No officers were injured.
Under Graham v. Connor, this is straightforward. Officers spent 40 minutes exhausting every non-lethal option available to them, deployed less-lethal tools twice, and only fired when a man charged them at close range with a knife raised. That’s not a close call. That’s a department doing everything right up until the moment the suspect took the decision out of their hands.
