The Yuba City Police Department released bodycam footage, 911 audio, and surveillance video from a February 26th officer-involved shooting involving a 31-year-old man named Guillermo Figueroa. The video was released within the 30-day window required by California law. It was narrated personally by Police Chief Jim Runyen. It is one of the most complete, transparent OIS releases I have seen from a department this size.
Watch it. Then read what I have to say.
What Officers Knew Before They Made Contact
This is where I always start. Not with the shooting. With the call.
At approximately 9:15 in the morning, dispatchers in Yuba City started receiving multiple 911 calls. A man — naked, completely nude — was running through a residential neighborhood on Wild River Drive. He was not wandering. He was not confused. He was violent.
Before Officers made visual contact with Figueroa, dispatch had relayed the following:
He punched a family member at a nearby residence. He then ran to a neighbor’s home and rammed through the front door. Shattered a window. Leaped over a car. Multiple callers, multiple incidents, all unfolding simultaneously.
I want you to understand what that means from an operational standpoint. This is not a wellness check. This is not a “man down” call. By the time those officers hit the gas, they knew they were rolling to an active violent incident — a person who had already put hands on someone, already forced entry into a private home, and was still moving.
The Call Every Officer Recognizes — And Dreads
I worked Southern California for two decades. When a call of a naked man acting irrationally comes over the radio, something happens on that shift that doesn’t get talked about enough in policing circles.
Everyone immediately starts heading toward that location.
Not because of policy. Because of experience. Every officer who has been on the job more than a few years knows exactly what that call means. It means a fight. Not maybe a fight. A fight. And it means a specific kind of fight that is unlike almost anything else you will encounter in a career.
In Southern California, we called them PCP calls. But PCP is just the most well-known name for the phenomenon. Methamphetamine in acute psychosis, synthetic drugs, and certain other substances can produce the exact same result. The drug doesn’t matter. The presentation is what matters.
Here is what that presentation looks like:
The subject is naked or nearly naked — often because they have become overheated from the drug’s effect on their body temperature. They are frequently drenched in sweat. Their eyes are not right. They do not respond to verbal commands the way a normal person does. They do not respond to pain the way a normal person does.
That last point is the one that changes everything on a use-of-force level. And it is the point I do not hear discussed enough when the public tries to second-guess what officers should have done.
Pain compliance is the foundation of virtually every less-lethal tool in law enforcement’s toolbox. When you deploy a Taser, you are banking on the subject’s nervous system responding to that electrical stimulus and causing involuntary muscle contraction and pain. When you use a baton, you are creating pain to get compliance. When you use a pain compliance hold, you are — by definition — using pain.
Take away pain response. Tell me what you have left.
I will tell you what you have left, because I have lived it. The fights of my career that I still think about — the ones that tested everything I had — were PCP calls. These are not suspects who are choosing to resist through willpower. Their brain is not processing pain signals the way yours or mine does. You can hit a joint that would make a sober person crumble, and they do not go down. You can deploy a Taser and watch it fail to produce the result you need.
When pain stops working, your options collapse fast. You are left with one of three outcomes: you physically disable their body — and I mean disable, I mean breaking joints, choking them unconscious, striking until they cannot physically continue — you get seriously hurt or killed, or you use lethal force.
That is not a policy failure. That is physics.
I am not diagnosing Guillermo Figueroa. I do not have his toxicology. But I know what I am looking at on that footage. The Taser failed. The baton failed. He broke through a fence and got back up. After being shot twice in the torso, he continued to fight. He required CPR.
I have seen this before. Every officer who has worked a busy urban department has seen this before. The public generally has not. And that gap in understanding is what drives the narrative that follows every one of these incidents.
The Encounter — Step by Step
Officers located Figueroa in the 1800 block of Rapid Falls Drive. He appeared — briefly — to surrender. He laid down. He put his arms out. Officers approached to handcuff him.
He had one cuff on when he rolled over and started fighting.
Officers deployed Tasers. Multiple times. Ineffective. They used baton strikes. Ineffective. Figueroa broke through a fence during the struggle, ended up face down, got back up. Officers were yelling “Stop resisting” and “Roll over.”
He entered a backyard. He picked up a shovel. He swung it at officers. Multiple times.
One officer fired twice. Both rounds struck the torso. Figueroa went down — and then continued to fight from the ground until he was fully handcuffed. Officers began CPR before EMS arrived.
That is the sequence. Every step of it is on camera.
Once in the back yard the suspect armed himself with a shovel and swung it at officers multiple times. As a result, an officer shooting occurred. After the suspect was shot, he continued to fight with officers and was eventually taken into custody.
— Chief Jim Runyen, Yuba City Police Department
The Legal Standard — And Why This Clears It
California has one of the strictest use-of-force laws in the country. Assembly Bill 392, which modified Penal Code Section 835a effective January 1, 2020, requires that deadly force be not merely reasonable — but necessary.
A peace officer is justified in using deadly force only when the officer reasonably believes, based on the totality of the circumstances, that such force is necessary to defend against an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury.
Let me walk you through every element.
Imminent threat: A shovel being actively swung at an officer’s body is not a hypothetical future threat. That is present-tense, contact-range lethal force.
Serious bodily injury or death: A full-strength swing of a metal and wood shovel to the head, neck, or face of a police officer is capable of killing them. That is not speculation. That is anatomy.
Totality of circumstances: Before the shovel ever entered the picture, officers knew this subject had assaulted a family member, breached two homes, resisted a ground struggle, survived Taser deployments, survived baton strikes, and broken through a fence. Every less-lethal option available had already been exhausted.
Necessary: When every other option has failed and a weapon is already in motion, there is no remaining alternative. That is the definition of necessary force.
This shooting clears California PC 835a. If it clears that standard, it clears federal Graham v. Connor. If it clears both of those, the rest is noise.
Chief Runyen Deserves Credit
I will give credit where it is earned, and I will criticize where it is warranted. On this one, Chief Jim Runyen handled the release right.
Thirty days out from the incident, YCPD released a professionally assembled package: 911 audio from multiple callers, residential Ring camera footage showing Figueroa ramming the door, body-worn camera from both officers, and still frames capturing the shovel in Figueroa’s hands. Runyen narrated the entire release himself — he did not delegate it to a PIO and disappear.
That matters. Transparency in the immediate aftermath of an OIS is how you prevent the narrative vacuum that the mob fills with speculation. Runyen filled it with facts. His department did this correctly.
My Assessment: Good Shoot
Twenty years of experience. I have seen what drugs do to the human body and the human mind. I have been in those fights. I know what it looks like when pain is no longer a controlling factor in a use-of-force situation.
This is a good shoot.
Officers exhausted every less-lethal option available to them. They were in a sustained, violent struggle with a subject who demonstrated superhuman resistance to pain-based compliance tools. When that subject armed himself with a deadly weapon and swung it at them, they responded with appropriate force to stop an imminent lethal threat.
They then rendered medical aid — including CPR — to the man who had just tried to take their heads off with a shovel.
The investigation is still active. The Sutter County District Attorney’s Office, the Yuba-Sutter Regional OIS Team, and the California Department of Justice are all reviewing the case. But based on the evidence available — the 911 audio, the surveillance footage, the bodycam, the documented use-of-force progression, and the legal standard that governs this — I see one result.
Cleared.
