Artist Ken Walton ad daughter Wren — Facebook.
In a post going viral on Facebook, Ken Walton describes being arrested at gunpoint by an Arizona Highway Patrol officer who threatened to shoot him in the back in front of his 7-year-old daughter.
Here’s what Ken says happened:
My daughter and I are from San Francisco, on vacation, traveling through the Southwest. Today we were driving from Hoover Dam to the Grand Canyon in a Toyota Camry we’d rented from Fox Car Rental in Las Vegas. In Williams, Arizona, as I exited Interstate 40 to head north toward the Canyon rim, I was pulled over by an AHP officer who’d been tailing me for a couple of miles. I hadn’t been speeding, so I wondered if perhaps the car had a broken taillight or something. I rolled down my window and waited.
Suddenly, the officer rapped on the rear passenger side window with his pistol. My daughter, who was sitting inches from the barrel of his gun, jumped with fear as the officer yelled at me to roll down the front passenger window, his service weapon pointed directly at me. I knew something was terribly awry and I tried to remain calm, keeping my hands visible as I slowly fumbled for the window controls in an unfamiliar car. My daughter rolled down her window and I explained that we were in a rental car, that we had no weapons, and I was having trouble figuring out how to roll down the front passenger window from my driver’s side door. The officer didn’t listen, and kept yelling louder and more insistently, ordering me to comply with his request as he leered at me down the barrel of his pistol. My daughter panicked and tried to get out of her booster seat to reach forward to roll down the front window, and the officer screamed at her not to move as he pointed his pistol at her.
Somehow I was able to get the window down, and then the officer ordered me to exit the car with my hands up. I did so slowly and with my hands raised as high in the air as possible, and as he came around to the driver’s side of the car he screamed at me to face away from him, as if I were doing something wrong. (I didn’t know this was the protocol for being arrested at gunpoint.) Then, as I had my hands in the air, he yelled, at the top of his lungs, in a voice I will never forget, as my daughter looked on in terror, “Get your hands away from your waist or I’ll blow two holes through your back right now!” My hands were high in the air as he said this, and I was not in any way reaching for my waist. I was utterly terrified. I’ve heard stories of police yelling out false things like this before they unjustifiably attack someone as a way to justify the attack, and I thought this was what was happening to me. I braced for bullets to hit me and all I could think of was my daughter having to watch it happen and being left alone on the side of the highway with an insane, violent cop.
The bullets didn’t arrive, though. I followed every order of the officer as slowly and deliberately as I could, very slowly backed toward him, got to my knees, was placed in handcuffs, and was thrown inside the back of his car. By this time many more officers had arrived, and I could see a couple of them talking to my daughter.
Why was I arrested? The car I had rented had previously had its front license plate lost or stolen, so the car rental company reported this to the Nevada DMV. The Arizona Highway Patrol officer, who looked up my plate number while he was tailing me, misinterpreted this Nevada DMV report as meaning that I was driving a car with a stolen license plate, and somehow this prompted him to approach me at gunpoint and threaten to kill me in front of my little girl.
After a few minutes he released me from the handcuffs, and since I knew the truth, I called him out for over-reacting, and told him he had no reason to threaten to shoot me. He stood by his story that I had made a threatening movement toward my waist, and I said it wasn’t true, and he said this wasn’t the place to discuss it. He let me go attend to my daughter, but continued to “detain” us for another 20 minutes as he talked to his supervisors, presumably plotting damage control.
I got his card, his supervisor’s number, the case number, and the cards of other officers on the scene. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it. My daughter is traumatized. She said she wanted to cry to the officers who were comforting her, but she was afraid they would get mad at her. As we drove the final hour to our Grand Canyon hotel, she told me she was confused, because she thought the police were the good guys, and she didn’t know why the officer said he would kill me when my hands were in the air. I tried to come up with an explanation but I struggled for words.
I’m not sure why I’m writing all this down. Maybe it’s because, as I sat in that back of that police car and heard the AHP officer learn the truth from his dispatcher – that the man he’d just captured at gunpoint and threatened to murder was totally innocent – I realized it was very possible that the only reason I was alive was because I am a scrawny 48-year-old white man wearing a Micky Mouse t-shirt and cargo shorts and hiking boots. The officer that arrested me was so pumped up on adrenaline and eager to get a “bad guy” that he could barely control himself, and if I’d looked just a little bit more threatening to him – because I was black, or young, or long-haired, or tattooed, or didn’t speak English – I believe he might have pulled the trigger.
If you are a person who has ever looked skeptically at the claims of Black Lives Matter, or others who talk about police violence, I urge you to consider what happened to me and put yourselves in the shoes of others. I just survived a bizarre gunpoint situation in which I was as innocent as Philando Castile, who was not as lucky as I was. We live in a society where anywhere and everyone can have a gun at any time, and police are responding with fear in dangerous ways. I got lucky tonight. My daughter and I made it to the Grand Canyon and I’m going to try to salvage what’s left of our vacation. Many others – because of the color of their skin or the way they look or because of simple bad luck – did not meet the same fate.
The Arizona Daily Sun has covered this, um, incident, in a decidedly slanted way. Mr. Walton notes they did not interview him for the article, and has responded to it here.
In the Daily Sun article, the cop side of this is:
While a spokesperson for DPS acknowledged Walton’s anger was understandable, he also called the man’s claims exaggerated and his anger misdirected.
“The bottom line is, our trooper did everything correctly,” said DPS Capt. Damon Cecil.
[…]
“Because he was alone and this was a high-risk situation, of course he had his gun drawn,” Cecil said. “He was getting no compliance and no response from Mr. Walton to his commands to shut off the vehicle.”
It was not immediately clear why the trooper did not wait for backup.
“We probably wouldn’t have wanted him to approach the vehicle like that, especially by himself, but he felt he needed to do it to expedite the matter, to resolve it as quickly as possible,” Cecil said.
So, right there, an admission that the cop did not adhere to proper procedure, but you know, that’s okay, because, um, that’s what he did. And anything a cop does is okay, by virtue of being done by a cop. Convenient, that.
DPS maintains Walton reached for his waistband. Walton said his hands were in the air the whole time.
“I’ve heard stories of police yelling out false things like this before they unjustifiably attack someone as a way to justify the attack, and I thought this was what was happening to me,” Walton said.
Cecil called that suggestion “patently ridiculous.”
“We don’t go out wanting to shoot people and if that was truly the intent of our trooper, why wouldn’t he have just done it?” Cecil said.
There is no video footage that would allow an outside party to see what really happened. Cecil said there was no dash camera in the vehicle and the trooper was not equipped with a body camera.
No one said that was the intent of your trooper when he clocked into work, you dimwit. Your trooper was clearly out of control, and barely contained. Since you fine upstanding cops can’t manage to police your own in the slightest way, it’s starting to look like all citizens need body cameras and voice recorders. If you won’t do it, we’ll have to do it.
Some of the officers tried to comfort Walton’s daughter, who he described as traumatized.
Right, she was traumatized, but the whole thing was exaggerated, and it wasn’t at all like Mr. Walton said. Nope.
Cecil said the DPS trooper is not the one he should be mad at.
“It was a horrible situation that didn’t need to happen and, thankfully, it didn’t turn tragic,” Cecil said. “Honestly, if things were done right when that stolen license plate was reported and the rental company had replaced the license plates for that vehicle as they should have, this would have never happened.”
And there we have the cops doing their usual “oh, this is really the fault of someone else, it is!” bullshit. And not a word of this would have been changed if Mr. Walton had ended up in a pool of blood at the hands of yet another out of control cop. A cop who won’t be disciplined, a cop who won’t be fired, a cop who will keep being out of control until the day he pulls that trigger.
Via Raw Story, CopBlock, and Arizona Daily Sun.
That’s why he didn’t wait for backup. If another cop car, with a dash cam, had showed up, he could have been held responsible for his actions.
Meanwhile, Flagstaff police have been wearing body cams for a year now. “The Flagstaff Police Department believes that on-officer video is an important and valuable tool for law enforcement.”
Apparently the state highway patrol can’t quite keep up with the kind of technology a mid-sized town uses.
LykeX:
Oh, in the wealth of excuses given in the AZsun article, their spokesweasel said that Mr. Walton forced the trooper to act by pulling over. I’ve had a cop trail me before, and I’ve done the same damn thing, pulled over and waited to see what would happen. Cops fucking hate that, but still, to react that way?
Even so, why couldn’t the cop have stayed in his car, gotten on his loudspeaker, and just told them to wait?
Johnny Vector:
I’m not surprised. For decades on end now, HP in all different states has had a large problem with criminal cops, a lot of them have committed rape, a fair number have committed murder (in more than once case, to cover up a rape), and so on. They have less oversight than regular cops, and consider themselves the ‘elite’.
Ok, wait. By Walton’s account, he was pulled over (to me this means flashy lights, siren) after an officer had tailed him a while. By HP’s account, Walton pulled to the side of the road entirely of his own accord and that scared the officer into threatening to kill him? Did I get that right?
Onamission5:
Yep, you got that right.
If I pull a gun on someone and wave it at them -- especially if they think it’s real and loaded -- that’s called “assault with a deadly weapon” and it’s a serious crime. I know; I did it once and got 2 years probation and some other stuff. Why is it OK if a cop can do it??
I know it’d have a snowball’s chance in hell, but it sure would be great to push for some legislation that strips cops of their immunity for threatening people with guns unless they can demonstrate they have a damn good reason. Not “I was scared” either. I’ve had cops draw down on me, too, and I’ve had drunk guy who wanted my wallet draw a .38 — guess which scared me more? Yeah, because I knew the guy’d be happy with the small wad of $20 and the cop was an unknown quantity.
Walton pulled to the side of the road entirely of his own accord and that scared the officer into threatening to kill him?
No, it’s actually worse than that:
Walton was complying with orders and that was so scary the cop threatened to kill him.
“OMG! He’s doing what I told him to!!! WHAM WHAM WHAM”
If the police claim that the cop followed all the procedures correctly then that means that they have an obligation to immediately change their procedures so as not to traumatize anone else and to prevent possible abuse of power. If the rules are not changed, then the department should be deemed unsafe and have to take full legal responsibility for any negative effects of not changing their policies.
The PD has now also been made aware that one of their cops may be lying and may be a danger to people so they should be legally required to take all the necessary precautions to ensure that this cop is not a danger to anyone.
That is, if police departments are at all accountable to *somebody*.
I still think that in the US, police should be forced to take a step towards the UK model of policing and have patrol officers do their jobs without a gun, and in most cases (except where there is a need, and significant training) without a TASER. Instead of emphasizing dominance and the use of overpowering force to gain compliance, training should focus on conversation and de-escalation. Instead of ubiquitous gun possession with really poor gun training (plenty of studies have shown that something like 8 of 10 rounds shot in anger by police officers miss their mark), have selective possession with exceptional training. Force should never be the default option because in assuming you’ll be met by an aggressive, dangerous person, and acting accordingly, you increase not only their risk of injury and death but your own, as any altercation increases the chance the police officer will be harmed. Preventing these situations as much as possible should be the goal of law enforcement everywhere.
Such a policy would be more palatable in a country with less overall gun ownership to be sure, but I think it’s possible to do so without significant risk to law enforcement officers in the current climate. If people were aware of the fact that they wouldn’t be facing likely overwhelming force in any encounter with a cop, regardless of how they act in said encounter, they wouldn’t fear and distrust law enforcement nearly as much as they do, and dangerous interactions would decrease.
Cops enjoy too much immunity from the consequences their actions would entail for non-cops. They signed up for a dangerous profession; it’s their job to enter any developing situation knowing they could be out-gunned. Current training methods have clearly given them a message that it’s okay to shoot first and ask questions later because it’s the best way to maximize their chances of not being injured or killed, and we’re seeing cop after cop not indicted, or acquitted by a jury who killed someone who was not armed or not threatening them with no cause. “Cops are heroes,” the rationale goes. “They put their lives on the line and sometimes make mistakes, but when they do, they shouldn’t be punished.” But again, they chose to be cops…if they err on the side of non-violence and die, they do their profession proud; if they err on the side of violence and kill people who never actually presented a threat, they do shame to their profession. If I had the balls to be a cop, I’d go with scenario #1 every time. Of course, I don’t have those balls, so as a cop, I’d be much more likely to choose #2. So I shouldn’t be a cop. And nor should anyone else who would go down that path! Your job is to serve the public, to protect the public, but it is NOT to fear the public, nor to make the public fear YOU.
Chris DeVries #10
Too late.
The USA is already a police state.
Weird thing about Az, as noted by Johnny Vector: Most of the cities (with some exceptions in the Phoenix area) are actually pretty good (Tucson, Flagstaff). The sherriffs are quite hit or miss (with the Maricopa county being run by the notorious Joe Arpaio), but are pretty good overall, since they seem to interact quite a lot with the residents, in spite of the huge size of our counties here.
The Highway Patrol/State troopers, though, seem to be a lot more aggressive and over reactive. This is based purely on my anecdotal evidence of talking to people from the area who have been pulled over or otherwise had to interact with the local constabulary.
One interesting thing is that I’ve found motorcycle cops to be way more chill and willing to talk and be friendlier than average. I have them stop and chat with me on my bicycle (while stopped at lights) quite regularly.