Leave it to Oakland to bring something you do not see every day.
What happened
July 13, 2:12 p.m., 40th Avenue and International Boulevard in the Fruitvale neighborhood of East Oakland.
CHP officers came across 43-year-old Jose Castillo at a homeless encampment near 42nd Avenue. He was carrying two homemade spears — large knives lashed to long metal poles. They told him to drop them. He refused, raised them at the officers, and walked away.
Oakland Police Department officers picked him up near East 12th Street and 41st Avenue. He refused every command they gave him, kept moving, and kept the weapons up. Three bystanders, including at least one child, had to be moved out of his path as he came down the sidewalk. Officers followed him on foot down 41st Avenue toward International.
He walked into a strip mall parking lot and turned on them. At least two Tasers were deployed and were only briefly effective. He shed his backpack and started swinging the spears.
Two Oakland officers fired. Castillo was pronounced dead at the scene. No officers or bystanders were injured.
What a knife on a pole actually is
People look at this and see a homeless man with a stick. That is not what officers were looking at.
The reactionary gap exists because a man with a knife inside 20 feet can close on you and put steel in you before you can process what is happening and respond. That is not theory. In the last two weeks alone we have reviewed a deputy who got stabbed inside 15 feet and another officer who came within a hair of the same thing inside 20.
Now lash that blade to a metal pole. You have not shortened the gap — you have erased it. He does not have to close the distance at all. He can thrust from outside your reaction time, or he can throw the thing like a javelin. Two of them.
By the time he was in that parking lot the threat level was already sitting on the edge of deadly, and it had been from the moment CHP first found him.
What they did right
They gave him room while it was only cops and him.
That is the part worth studying. They did not crowd him. They walked with him. They kept giving commands. They went to less-lethal first and tried it twice. The officer closest to him — the one with the least cover and the most exposure — was carrying a Taser instead of a firearm, and that is almost certainly the only reason this did not end on the sidewalk when Castillo started to turn toward a group of people.
Once they reached the parking lot they had better positioning and real cover, with lethal coverage held back. That is a well-managed slow-moving problem.
When the room runs out
Space is a luxury, and civilians take it away.
I have no problem with officers burning time to try to talk somebody down or find another way, as long as the only people who can get hurt are the cops and the man with the weapons. That is a choice they are entitled to make about their own risk.
That option disappears the moment he is walking toward a business full of people with two spears in his hands. You can hear it on the video — somebody recognizes it. They know they cannot let this man reach a door.
If he goes into that business, everyone inside becomes a potential victim, and nobody gets to hack up a room full of strangers because officers wanted more de-escalation time.
Where the line actually was
They did not shoot him for walking away. They did not shoot him for ignoring commands. They did not shoot him for entering the parking lot.
They shot him when he stopped running, turned around, took his pack off so he could swing freely, and came at them.
That is the line. It held exactly where it was supposed to.
