First death-by-cop in 2015 presents challenge to claims of renewed oversight

When Jose Roberto Leon succumbed to the wounds he suffered from a patrolman’s sidearm last week, he left behind a grim opportunity for the county’s new district attorney to put her campaign promise into gear.

On March 17, a California Highway Patrol officer reportedly shot Leon when a traffic stop turned physical in Rio Linda. According to the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department, Leon fled the scene by carjacking a blue Ford Bronco and made it inside a Natomas residence, where the 22-year-old was found dead two hours later.

Because the shooting occurred in the sheriff’s jurisdiction, the department is leading on the investigation. For the first time in three-and-a-half years, the DA’s office is actually providing oversight.

In January, her first month in office, DA Anne Marie Schubert restarted the office’s independent investigations of officer-involved shootings for the first time since her predecessor halted the practice in July 2011 in response to budget cuts.

Following that decision to pull DA oversight, officer-involved shootings spiked in the region, with the sheriff’s department accounting for a dozen in 2012.

Those numbers have since come back down.

In a four-page report on the new protocols, released March 4, the DA’s office states it “will conduct independent reviews of all officer-involved shooting incidents that results in injury or death,” as well as other uses of force resulting in death. “This includes sending District Attorney investigators to the scene as well as [providing] an independent legal analysis as well,” Schubert told SN&R via email.

The protocols provide greater authority than in the past, but stop shorter than some law-enforcement critics might want. For instance, under these new protocols, the DA’s office may choose not to send an investigator to the scene of a shooting or death-in-custody incident. The word “may” crops up a lot, in fact, providing conditional authority for DA investigators to observe witness interviews, attend autopsies, request their own crime scene analyses or even conduct a wholly separate investigation that the jurisdictional agency may or may not know about.

Or none of those things.

Before she was elected in June, Schubert highlighted the problem with not sending DA investigators to officer-involved shooting scenes. “We cannot have the police investigating themselves,” she wrote to SN&R’s editorial board. “It’s time to return to full-scale independent review of officer involved shootings.”

But the DA’s policy shift likely won’t result in additional prosecutions for wrongful shootings.

Before former DA Jan Scully ended independent reviews in 2011, the office prosecuted only two officer-involved shootings over more than 30 years.