Editorial: Officer fired for not shooting Pittsburgh man deserves better

While no shooting is worthy of praise, some are unfortunately understandable given the circumstances. Even in such cases, there are often victims of injustice.

On May 6 in Weirton, W. Va. police officer Stephen Mader — a former Marine — confronted a 23-year-old Pittsburgher named Ronald D. “R.J.” Williams Jr. When Mader arrived at the scene, responding to a domestic violence call, Williams was standing with his gun pointed at the ground and asking Mader to shoot him. Mader refused, recognizing the an attempted suicide-by-cop — a situation in which individuals attempt to die by provoking fatal reactions from law enforcement officers — and began calmly urging Williams to drop his weapon.

Maders said in an interview with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his training as a Marine taught him to assess someone acting belligerently by “see[ing] the whole person,” or determining what might be the root cause of a person’s violent behavior. In this case, Mader immediately recognized that Williams could most likely have been talked down.

But as he was trying to do just this — “speaking calmly” to Williams from behind a car — two more officers arrived on the scene. Williams began waving his gun as he walked toward the officers, prompting them to fire their weapons. A bullet struck Williams in the back of the head and killed him. Officers later discovered Williams’ weapon was not loaded, but an investigation declared the shooting justifiable.

After several strange moves by the Weirton Police Department — including an announcement that all three officers had returned to duty as usual when that was not the case — Police Chief Rob Alexander ultimately fired Mader. Alexander accused the former Marine of endangering his fellow officers by not immediately shooting an armed man who provoked him.

But Mader’s behavior wasn’t reckless. It was a measured, careful response based on the circumstances he observed that he wasn’t able to communicate to his backup detail in time. In other words, it was an example of the direction police training should go in order to eliminate — or at least limit — fatal shootings.

In this case, there isn’t really anyone on whom to place the blame, despite what the Weirton Police Department decided. Mader readily said he thinks the officers who shot Williams acted appropriately because they had no way of knowing the full circumstances, and he’s probably right. The officers showed up to find a man waving a gun and threatening them. Their previous training taught them to act swiftly to “eliminate the threat” — a phrase used in the termination letter Mader received after the incident.

But the scenario points to something much larger: the need for better mental health and threat assessment training for police officers. Mader faces punishment for doing exactly what critics of law enforcement have been asking of officers for years — to see, in Mader’s words, “the whole person.”

Williams was a black man, and the shooting is currently under investigation by the West Virginia Civil Liberties Union. Clearly, Weirton Police clearly did not want this to sully their image, which is why the Chief chose to fire Mader rather than admitting that his de-escalation tactics were probably commendable.

Years of police shooting black men show a recurring theme of a lack of effective crisis management and communication techniques.

Although this incident occurred in West Virginia, other cities, including Pittsburgh, could benefit from the difficult lesson learned. According to an article in March from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that analyzed data from the Department of Human Services, over the last five years, dispatch operators in 18 municipalities in Pittsburgh have received more than 50 psych calls per 1,000 residents. The majority of the neighborhoods in question did not send officers for Crisis Intervention Training.  

Throughout the country, in cities including Seattle, San Antonio and Buffalo, N.Y., police departments have implemented crisis intervention training. The Post-Gazette found that Pittsburgh’s CIT training is currently subpar at best.

In general, officers are poorly trained in de-escalating situations before things become violent, leading to panicked responses from both police and the people with whom they are interacting.

There’s no way to say if Williams would still be alive if the additional officers had not appeared. We will never know whether Mader would have been able to calm him enough to get the unloaded gun on the ground. What we can say for sure is that the entire horrific incident is a signal of inadequate police training, and Mader is someone we should learn from rather than fire and forget.