‘You will never cross that thin blue line’: ID resident calls for police accountability

A Star man whose 39-year-old son was killed by police last summer is calling on the Star City Council and Ada County Sheriff’s Office to provide more police officer accountability.

Skip Banach, a former San Diego police officer, asked the City Council to codify a civilian review board to analyze and make determinations about shootings by officers and injuries they cause. Banach said the board should be made up of local community members who do not work in law enforcement or the criminal justice system.

“Police cannot police themselves,” Banach told the council on Tuesday. “You will never cross that thin blue line.”

According to Star police, whose department is staffed by the Sheriff’s Office, Jeremy Banach was holding a handgun he had stolen from a family member as he walked through the parking lot of the Star Mercantile downtown on June 15, 2022. Officer Jason Woodcook and other officers told Banach to drop the gun. Instead, he raised the gun toward the back of his head. Officers believed he was going to aim it at them. Woodcook fired.

Skip Banach sees the shooting differently. “They shot him five times with an AR-15 while he was walking away,” he told the Idaho Statesman in a phone interview.

Banach has participated in protests in downtown Boise in recent weeks that followed a police killing of 22-year-old Payton Wasson, of Nampa, on June 24. Boise police said they tried to make contact with the occupants of a suspicious vehicle downtown about 2 a.m. when Wasson left the vehicle and fled on foot with a gun. Officer Chance Feldner shot Wasson while he was running away.

State law requires that to use deadly force on a suspect, an officer must feel threatened or someone else must be threatened by the individual.

The Wasson shooting has led to calls for an end to police violence and greater accountability when police officers fire their weapons. For Banach, it was the last straw to begin the call for civilian review boards in cities across Idaho.

According to The Washington Post’s police shooting database, Idaho police officers have killed 71 people since 2015. Twelve shootings were in Boise, four were in Meridian, four were in Nampa and four were in Caldwell.

That is too many for this small state, Banach said.

Banach’s citizen’s review board would be made up of retired officers, attorneys and prosecutors from other states and at least one mental health professional.

“No retired officer or acting officer from the state of Idaho should be on it,” Banach said.

Civilian review boards like what Banach is proposing are not unusual in the United States. The U.S. Department of Justice has a 180-page handbook available online about how people can implement civilian review boards in their communities.

“The most active citizen oversight boards investigate allegations of police misconduct and recommend actions to the chief or sheriff,” the handbook said. “Other citizen boards review the findings of internal police investigations and recommend that the chief or sheriff approve or reject the findings.”

Why Star?

Forensic tests determined that Jeremy Banach was intoxicated on fentanyl and methamphetamine at the time of the shooting, authorities said. Police said he’d been a suspect in several property crimes. In March, Valley County Prosecutor Brian Naugle found Woodcook’s actions were justified when he shot and killed Banach.

According to reporting by the Statesman, Star has had just one police officer killing since 2021. So why does Banach want to start a civilian review board in Star?

Because he lives there, he said. He said he has no plans to be a part of the board if it is created.

He told City Council that the small rural city is growing rapidly and is no longer the 5,000-person town he moved to. Today Star’s population is 17,000, according to the Community Planning Association of Southwest Idaho.

“Citizens of Star deserve a civilian review board so they can rest assured that police will be held accountable for their actions,” he said. “Any shooting or serious injury by police would have a civilian board look at it.”

How citizens review board would be different

After Banach spoke, Council Member Kevin Nielsen asked him how a citizen’s review board would be different than the investigations that already take place in Idaho when police fire their weapons.

When officers kill someone on duty, Idaho law requires that a Critical Incident Task Force, which is made up of law enforcement personnel from a nearby department, to conduct an investigation.

Then, prosecutors in counties outside of the area where the shooting took place review the task force’s investigation and decide whether officers were justified.

But that isn’t independent enough, according to Banach and other critics.

Pierce Murphy, the former police oversight director for the city of Boise until 2013, told the Statesman that civilian oversight boards can take many forms depending on the city, its budget and department.

“It’s really important for whatever mechanism to be truly independent from the police department,” Murphy said by phone. “That means giving it the authority and the resources to investigate and look into either an allegation or an incident.”

Murphy said the board must make sure it doesn’t rely on police to do any investigations, because even the way police question witnesses or decide which questions to ask can sway an investigation.

“Whether it’s the sheriff’s office or another neighboring police agency, or the state Office of the Attorney General or the Justice Department, even prosecutors are law enforcement,” Murphy said. “The whole idea is to have someone that doesn’t work every day in and around the people that were involved in the incident.”

Ada County sheriff ‘accountable to voters’

Patrick Orr, spokesperson for the Ada County Sheriff’s Office said they believe the policy they follow after police shootings is enough to instill public trust in the department.

The office provides a narrative of the incident and posts a redacted Critical Incident Task Force report when it is completed.

Orr said the sheriff’s office has not heard calls like Banach’s for a citizens review board.

“The sheriff is accountable to the voters of Ada County,” he said in an email. “Every one of our 800+ employees work every day to keep Ada County a safer place to live, work, and play. We are all accountable to the people we serve and work to adapt to the needs of the community.”

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