Santa Rosa police ‘set officers up to fail’ with projectiles fired during George Floyd protest, investigation finds

The Santa Rosa Police Department’s purchasing decisions as far back as 2018 contributed to officers firing four tactical rounds designed to penetrate windows and walls at people protesting racism and police brutality last summer, according to newly released reports on the disciplining of two officers.

Flawed decisions to purchase rubber bullets — controversial in their own right — as well as similar-looking rounds for puncturing barricades collided with an aggressive police response to protests over police brutality, racism and the death of George Floyd last May, leading to the permanent injury of a protester in Santa Rosa.

Two officers were disciplined with 20-hour unpaid suspensions as a result of the investigations made public this week, one for firing the unauthorized rounds without checking and another for misusing a projectile launcher and shattering a protester’s mouth with a rubber bullet.

“This investigation revealed culpability at a department level as well as at an individual level,” SRPD Lt. Ryan Corcoran, the officer in charge of the department’s professional standards division, wrote in a review of Wednesday’s findings about the projectiles.

The resulting injuries to citizens were severe. A Healdsburg man struck with an unauthorized round lost a testicle, while the Santa Rosa man struck in the face with the misused rubber bullet required multiple surgeries. Both were part of lawsuits against the police and the city and received large settlements.

Jerry Threet, the chair of the Sonoma County Human Rights Commission, which has called for more accountability for how police handled the protests, said the punishments didn’t satisfy activists who had been involved in the protests. “Suspension without pay for maiming someone for life,” Threet said, “is that harsh enough?”

The release of the investigations into the two officers’ use of force comes a month after public hearings that showcased a continuing community divide over the city’s response to last summer’s protests. Elected officials meanwhile continue to grapple with whether and to what extent the city should institute new policies governing how its police department responds to protests.

“It’s something that we all have a vested interest in ensuring never occurs again,” Santa Rosa City Councilwoman Victoria Fleming, chair of the council’s public safety committee, said of the misuse of rounds and resulting injuries. She said her committee plans further discussions on the police response in the wake of May’s tense public hearings, and she hopes to hear more from the department itself.

“It’s too soon for me to see the exact policy direction of where we should go,” she said.

Police Chief Ray Navarro said his department had instituted a number of policy changes in the wake of the various investigations into its protest response. The department had increased training for using the 40mm launchers, separated the barricade rounds from the rubber bullets and was purchasing rubber bullets with distinctive blue tips, he said.

Further, the department had instituted policies putting the decision about when to use tear gas and the nonlethal rounds in the hands of lieutenants, not just lower-ranking sergeants, he said.

“I think we’ve addressed a lot of the issues that have come up,“ Navarro said. The department welcomed the public safety subcommittee meetings and further public discussion of its policies, he said, but he worried about restrictions on his officers’ use of nonlethal weapons.

“If we don’t have these particular options what do we have left?” if a protest turns violent or destructive, he said. “How do we resolve the situation? I have not heard from the public a particular solution.”

The documents, released under a state law that requires the publication of investigative reports into any police use of force that causes death or serious bodily injury, show that in January 2020 the Santa Rosa Police Department purchased 52 40mm launchers, with the ultimate goal of outfitting every patrol car with one of the weapons.

In separate procurements between 2018 and 2019, the department purchased the rounds designed to penetrate barricades, and “rubber bullets” designed for riot control. Both had black tips and were of a similar size and shape, but had distinctly different purposes.

The barricade rounds are designed to punch through a building or car window, or even a thin door, and release gas, Navarro said. They are designed for use in standoff situations with barricaded subjects.

Camera footage, interview transcripts and the disciplinary documents filed against two officers show how the procurement decisions and the tense demonstrations collided during a long night of protests as officers fired round after round from the 40mms.

The purchasing of similar appearing rounds “set officers up for failure during a low light, stressful incident,” Corcoran, the professional standards officer, wrote in the report.

After midnight on May 31, as some protesters threw rocks, eggs, a metal garbage can lid and fireworks, Officer Noel Gaytan ran low on ammo for his 40mm launcher and asked his supervisor for more, according to the police investigation. Soon two canisters of munitions were brought up to the “skirmish line” and Gaytan and others grabbed fresh rounds — not realizing they were grabbing “barricade rounds” designed for puncturing barriers instead of the rubber bullets they’d been using before. Gaytan grabbed five of the rounds.

He fired his first barricade round at 1:02 a.m, aiming at a protester trying to kick a tear gas canister back at the crowd. Within the next 34 seconds Gaytan appeared to fire two more, according to the report. The 40mm launchers are a breach action weapon — they must be cracked open, the existing round ejected and a new round added.

As he quickly reloaded and fired, Gaytan failed to check what type of rounds he was loading, a violation of his training as a “grenadier” according to the report.

One of the rounds struck home, hitting Healdsburg resident Argelio Giron and sending him to the hospital for an emergency surgery to remove a ruptured testicle. Santa Rosa paid him $200,000 as part of a settlement last year.

Giron collected the round that struck him, his attorney Mark Merin said. They provided a photograph of the round to the city but declined to turn over the original, Merin said. Merin told The Press Democrat in November that the round that struck his client was hard plastic weighing a couple of ounces.

City officials did not disclose the mistaken use of the barricade rounds publicly until they published the OIR Group report in late April.

Given the damage rubber bullets can achieve on their own, the type of round was not the point, Merin said on Thursday.

“We’re getting to a place as a society where we’re starting to say ‘they should’ve used a different type of munition,’” he said. If police thought Giron was participating in an illegal assembly, they should have sought to arrest, not wound him, he said.

“They shouldn’t have used any munition,” Merin said.

“The person who should be punished is the police chief,” he said. “The officer is just a tool; he’s just misusing a weapon that’s put in his hands by the higher-ups.”

Officers used the 40mm launchers on protesters after curfews were imposed to protect downtown businesses, though the protests were mostly peaceful. Damage, which included broken windows and some graffiti, was far less extensive than what was seen in major cities and Santa Rosa has not provided a dollar estimate related to vandalism during the protests.

An investigation into the police response commissioned by the city and carried out by Los Angeles based firm the OIR Group found that the “overwhelming majority” of force SRPD used was in response to unlawful acts. But the report called for shifting future tactics, saying the deployment of projectiles and tear gas amounted to “a confrontational exercise of state authority” that further fueled the protests and stoked hostility toward police from those in the crowd.

The police department has yet to offer a complete explanation of how the unauthorized rounds got onto the streets that night. A previous investigation by an outside law firm failed to reach a conclusion about how that occurred, and this week’s investigations did not rule on the matter either.

The two sets of rounds were stored in the same area in the police station, Navarro said, and in the rush to bring more ammo to the officers clashing with protesters, someone grabbed the wrong containers. “They’re packaged in a similar way,” Navarro said. “They were in these round tins. Staff went grabbed the tins and brought them out.”

Investigators never learned which officer did so, he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Andrew Graham at 707-526-8667 or andrew.graham@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @AndrewGraham88