On April 10th, Urbana Police officers arrested Aleyah Lewis using, to put it mildly, highly questionable techniques. Alongside many other Urbana residents, I have been voicing my disgust for the handling of this incident frequently at City Council meetings, and I have been following the story closely.
There is one aspect of the arrest that I took note of fairly early on, sometime after Mayor Marlin announced that she hired the Chicago firm Hillard Heintze to review the incident (at a cost of $20,000 to the taxpayers). I became curious about Officer Eric Ruff’s handling of his rifle during the arrest, so I went back and played that video slowly.
The poor rifle handling was plainly visible in the bystander video which was posted online, but the body worn camera video really illustrates just how poorly things were handled. The rifle barrel is frequently hitting and scraping the concrete, and while being swung around haphazardly, is frequently pointed at Aleyah Lewis, the other officers, and often at Ruff’s own foot/leg.
What I really wanted to see is if Ruff had switched the rifle’s safety on during this mess. It takes a careful eye, but the body worn camera video clearly answers this question: the safety selector was set to “FIRE” during the entire wrestling match.
The rifle that Ruff was carrying appears to be a Smith & Wesson M&P-15. This is an AR-15 variant, and the M&P stands for “military and police”. The exact model is not terribly important; what is important is that pretty much every AR-15 variant has the safety selector in the same spot, just aft of the trigger. For comparison, here is a clear photo of such a rifle, with the safety selector circled in red:
On scene, Eric Ruff drives up behind officer Michael Cervantes, and Ruff already has his rifle in his lap while driving. When he gets out of his car, the safety selector is clearly in the “SAFE” position, and Ruff is just about to move it to the “FIRE” position. We can probably assume that Ruff intended for his rifle to have the ability to fire bullets, so he probably had a properly loaded magazine and the first round chambered at this point (otherwise the rifle may as well have been a baseball bat).
Here we can see that Ruff has the safety selector in the FIRE position:
The image above shows Ruff’s rifle just as he begins running toward Cervantes and Lewis. The image below shows the safety selector right after Ruff has jumped on top of Lewis, still in the FIRE position:
After about 40 seconds of wrestling, with Ruff’s rifle bouncing around and pointing at pretty much everyone in the area at one time or another, I captured another still frame:
It is important to understand that the video provided by UPD appears to show double images pretty much any time there is motion in a frame. So every object we see has a kind of shadow artifact. You can see this “double vision” effect in pretty much every image. What we’re seeing here is the indicator on the round safety selector still pointing up, in the FIRE position. We see the safety selector twice because of the way the camera captures motion:
One more time, after Cervantes, Ruff, and Koker finally manage to handcuff Lewis, we catch a glimpse of Ruff’s rifle. This image is the most difficult to interpret, but we pretty clearly see the bottom of the safety selector lever, meaning the rifle is still set to FIRE:
Admittedly, it has been a while since I’ve personally handled an AR-15 style rifle. I am not aware of any commonly (or uncommonly) used device or technique to add a second safety selector to such a rifle. With a properly chambered round, and the safety selector in the FIRE position, the gun will discharge with a trigger pull – that’s its job. Rendering the gun completely safe by removing the magazine and chambered round would not have been reasonable in the situation and it would have been very noticeable if Ruff had attempted to do so. Therefore, I conclude that the rifle was ready to fire at any moment during the Lewis arrest.
There are two things that one can conclude from this information:
The first is that the Lewis arrest was incredibly dangerous. Ruff’s rifle was all over the place, and was pointed at almost everyone at various times with the safety off. A discharge could have hit Lewis, a bystander, or the officers on scene. Take another look at the image above where Ruff is holding Lewis’s hands just above the rear sight of his rifle. We can only imagine who would have been blamed had the rifle discharged and Ruff lost his left foot.
The second thing that we can conclude is that neither the Urbana Police Department nor the Hillard Heintze firm actually wanted to meaningfully review anything. From a fleeting thought, it took me about 5-7 minutes to pull up the Ruff video and come to the conclusions written above. The unsecured rifle was probably the most negligent and dangerous aspect of the Lewis arrest, but none of our professionals have really given it much thought, probably because no one publicly complained about it. Through my years of work, this reactionary posture is entirely consistent with how I’ve come to understand police and government accountability: everything is about image instead of quality of service.
Now, Mayor Marlin, can we please get our $20,000 back?
-Christopher Hansen, Urbana
Here is Eric Ruff’s body camera video, in case you want to review it yourself: