The shooting scene on Magdalena in Serrano Heights. A neighbor was very disturbed about how the Orange Police handled the domestic situation.
BY BRIAN HEWS
Last week, Orange Police Department officers shot and killed a “suicidal” man with a knife in the upscale community of Serrano Heights in East Orange, California.
Hews Media Group was able to talk to a nearby resident who said the man who was shot was the son of her neighbor.
The resident, who did not want to be identified, indicated the man did have problems, but she was very disturbed that he was shot.
To me, they (the OPD) “escalated the situation instead of de-escalating it.”
HMG has called the public information officer for the OPD since the day of the shooting for comment, with no response.
“The parents are absolutely grief stricken,” the neighbor said, “they just wanted him to settle down, that’s why they called the police, they never thought they would shoot him.”
This type of domestic disturbance call is at issue among law enforcement officers, when officers have a clear advantage in use of force, in this case, a gun versus a knife.
Officers across the country face scrutiny for their use of force on unarmed individuals.
But there might be an answer to the problem, and many have questioned why the OPD has not tested the product, which might have defused the situation in Serrano Heights.
It is called the BoloWrap and is currently being used by several law enforcement agencies across the country.
The Batman-like device fires a cord that can entangle an individual’s torso or legs from up to 25 feet away.
The tether is intended to restrict the person’s movement, allowing officers to take action without using force.
Two hundred Los Angeles police officers will be trained to use the new gadget beginning in January.
Wrap Technologies, the company that makes BoloWrap, describes it as “a hand-held remote restraint device that discharges an 8 foot bola-style Kevlar tether”.
At the end of the tether, fired at 513 feet per second, are two small barbs that attach to a person when they make contact.
“Suspects are restrained with minimal to no pain, while also enabling officers to swarm and de-escalate the situation,” the company says on its website .
Several police forces, including Fresno and Hendersonville in North Carolina, have been training their officers to use the BolaWrap.
In October, a Fresno police officer used a BolaWrap gun to apprehend a man who had stabbed two people with a kitchen knife.
