Not Even a Fatality Review Hearing
Mitchell Bisson, a Las Vegas-based Attorney, is working for the family of Phillip Serrano, the 44-year-old who died after being shot by Reno police on September 23, 2018. Bisson says he is still very much “in the dark,” about what happened that night, beyond initial media reports and a video subsequently released by the watchdog group Reno Cop Watch on social media.
The video shows a white truck slowly inching toward a half dozen police already on the scene, followed by shouting, and a deluge of gunfire. Bisson says in Clark County what’s called a fatality review hearing is usually held within a year, which includes the presentation of an internal police investigation.
“Usually we can take that to talk to the family, to figure out if there's an actual claim here. Unfortunately in this case, we've just been left in the dark. So we are going to have to file a lawsuit just based on the minimal information we know, and the video that exists. It seems like they're trying to point at obviously his truck with some headlights on it, as being a deadly weapon and that they had no choice. I mean, I don't think that that'll hold up in court. I don't think there was truly any risk at that point, especially a risk of serious harm that they thought they were going to get run over by a truck that's going maybe two miles per hour after they'd already been talking with him for a good 20 to 30 minutes. I just don't think they're going to have an explanation, but man, we've been waiting for something, any type of answer,” Bisson said expressing his own frustration with the delay. Nearly two years after the killing, there has been no report released by Sparks police and the Washoe County DA’s office. In the Reno/Sparks area, the neighboring police force investigates killings by the other, before anything is released in coordination with the District Attorney’s office.
“It just seems something seems off in this situation that it's literally been almost two years since this occurred. We're up against a statute of limitations. Typically, we like to get the information, a little more information to really figure out what their story is, but it almost seems like they're trying to delay giving us information. Something is off about that. It's all confidential investigatory material. So the longer they delay it, the longer we are all sitting here with no answers.”
A screengrab of the initial video Reno Cop Watch released: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=236650857196335
Civil Rights Lawsuit in the Works
We tried calling Sparks PD for an update on the investigation but no one answered the phone.
Serrano’s daughter is going to be a co-administrator of her father’s estate, and Bisson is preparing a civil rights lawsuit for wrongful death and multiple violations of civil rights. He says he is thinking of filing it at the federal court in Carson City. “That's where the parties are going to be more local. We're going to have to go up there to depose the police officers. So we just figured we should do it up there,” he said of his current strategy.
After the Black Lives Matter protests and updated reports here on Our Town Reno, long awaited investigations in local police killings of Miciah Lee and Rolando Brizuela were finally released. Bisson says he appreciates the growing concerns for these cases which he says leads to pressure on police departments and the District Attorney.
“The fact that awareness is happening is good because now you actually have some uproar, you have some community support versus you just simply have a family who lost a family member going up against the police, trying to get answers. Back in the day, you'd never get the answers, especially if you didn’t file a lawsuit, they could just, you know, string you along, not give you the info, dragging on until you can't bring the case. And then you're out of luck. Now there's enough community support that they almost have to start giving answers.”
He says he feels many more people are looking into local police killings currently. “It's always been, a few people here and there willing to fight the police or bring a claim against the police. A lot of people get scared though. They're worried that, ‘hey, the police are going to come out and try to tarnish my family's name or they're going to come and there's no way we'll win this.’ But the more support we have, the more people see the reality of what goes on in these police departments, the more people will be confident in actually asserting their rights and making sure that the police are held accountable. So at the end of the day, I think this public uproar is needed. It's absolutely necessary.”
Above, a screengrab from the City of Reno website recently updating police use of force policies.
Seeking an End to Qualified Immunity
The Las Vegas based lawyer says it will be interesting to see how police departments react.
“You seem to have some police departments that will come along with this and they understand what's happening. They see the issues, but then you have police departments that take the opposite road and see this as an attack. And hopefully that's not the way it goes. The police departments start going on the defensive here because at the end of the day, they’ve already got all these built-in immunities and privileges. So hopefully they will be a little more willing to come to the table to show their cards and to answer for what they've done.”
What Bisson would like to see are drastic changes to what’s know as qualified immunity. This legal precedent currently shields government officials, including police, from being held personally liable for constitutional violations, such as excessive use of force.
“That legally created doctrine alone is what gets these police officers off. They're able to basically, if, as long as I, the judge rules that these police officers, when this incident happened, if there wasn't a previous case, almost exactly like it, where an officer has already been found in trouble for it, they get off. And a lot of times these federal court judges like to kind of gloss over the cases to where they're not creating the law, that future cases could point to. It’s all a gross miscarriage of justice that these police officers are allowed to basically just kill almost whoever they want and not even give us an explanation.”
He wouldn’t be surprised if the DA rules the Serrano killing to “be justified by Nevada law,” as was the case recently in the killings of Lee and Brizuela.
“They're just trying to pull the wool over our eyes, say, ‘hey, this was justified. Nothing to see.’ They always do that,” Bisson said, but he explained it doesn’t prevent civil action. “Just because they may say it was legally justified on a criminal aspect, the civil rights violations are a whole different ball game. There is less, you actually have to prove in a civil action. “
In the wake of the protests, Reno PD updated its use of force policy, including “restrictions on shooting at or from vehicles.” “You've seen it in the past where, you know, an officer's firing into a vehicle and oops, they didn't know there was a kid in the car as well,” Bisson said. “Once you're shooting into a vehicle, you don't know the trajectory of that bullet. Once it goes, hits the glass, it can move around. There's just a lot of potential for problems when you're shooting into a vehicle without a clear sight. And especially in this case with Phillip, I mean, I don't know. I believe he was shirtless. He didn't have a gun. They were called there for a mental disturbance. The family called for help. But instead they sent, man, if you've seen the video, they sent a boatload of police officers to surround him. And the minute he started creeping forward, they just unloaded. And I just don't see at all how that's justified regardless of what the DA wants to say.”