Police shootings seem far too common in Idaho. This former cop has an idea for reform | Opinion

In June 2022, 39-year-old Jeremy Banach was shot and killed by police in Star.

He was high. He had a gun. He refused to be arrested. As he walked away, he pointed the gun at his head. That’s when police shot and killed him.

The Ada County Critical Incident Task Force found the officer who shot him did nothing wrong, and Valley County Prosecutor Brian Naugle agreed.

But Skip and Gina Banach, Jeremy’s parents, have a very different perspective. And their faith in the system Idaho uses to investigate officer-involved shootings is gone.

“Police cannot police themselves,” Skip said in an interview. “... In most situations, police will not cross that thin blue line. To do so is to get ostracized by other officers.”

Unanswered questions

Theirs is a perspective particularly worth hearing out because Skip is a former patrol officer from San Diego.

It was the Banachs who first called the police, hoping to get their son help. That’s not what they got.

“I just wanted him to have court-mandated detox and rehab … not to have them kill him,” Skip said. “One of the deputies come up to us and says, ‘This isn’t gonna end well.’ … And it didn’t. They killed my son.”

Skip says what officers did that day does not comport with the training he received as a cop, and he was shocked when there were no consequences.

For example, Skip contends his son should have been arrested earlier that day when he was at his parents’ home. That was where police first encountered Jeremy, obviously intoxicated and carrying a gun concealed in his waistband. Police instead allowed him to walk away from his parents’ home and decided to arrest him once they determined that the gun in his possession was likely stolen.

It is a crime in Idaho to carry concealed while under the influence, Skip pointed out, something that was never discussed in the report on the investigation.

And it does seem to be a question worth asking: Were officers negligent in allowing Jeremy to walk away armed and intoxicated? Could his death, and further danger to the public, have been avoided by arresting him at the first encounter?

Another thing that seems strange to me about the investigation is the consistent conclusion that Jeremy was pointing a gun at police when he was shot. For example: “(Jeremy) … stole a gun from a family member the night before and pointed it in the direction of two Star Police detectives when he was shot,” the Ada County Sheriff’s Office said in its news release announcing there would be no charges.

When I look at the body camera video, it looks like Jeremy was pointing a gun at his head — and only at his head, not at the officers behind him. Officers claimed they thought he was preparing to fire backward over his shoulder, but I don’t see anything like that. It looks to me like a clear threat of suicide, not to hurt someone else.

(Watch the video at around 6:00, and draw your own conclusions.)

A better system of investigations

The critical incident task force system, which Idaho currently uses to investigate police use of force, does not deliver a true outsider’s perspective.

It ensures that the one police department is not investigating its own shootings, which is good, but shootings are generally investigated by neighboring police departments — in this case, by having a Boise detective investigate a shooting in Star. And while charging decisions are not made by the prosecutor of the county where the shooting took place, they are often made by the prosecutor in a neighboring county — in the Banach case, by Naugle, who Skip points out worked for years in the Ada County Prosecutor’s office before seeking election in Valley County.

It’s rather easy to see how bias could be a problem in a situation like that, even if it isn’t intentional.

I am not sure police did something criminal or against police procedure in the Banach shooting, and I am not certain that the investigation came to the wrong conclusion by choosing not to level any sanctions in response. But I am certain that I would be more confident in the findings of an outside commission that did not share the same social circles, mindset and professional values as the officers under investigation.

Even if the findings did not include any kind of wrongdoing, an outside set of eyes might well lead to improvements in procedure that would make tragedies like Jeremy’s death less common.

That could be achieved by a proposal the Banachs are currently fighting for: a true citizen review board to oversee investigations of use-of-force incidents at the regional level composed of people who have not served in Idaho law enforcement.

For obvious reasons, such a body would be less likely to be sympathetic and would be more likely to be objective. And that’s what the Banachs deserve: a thorough, unbiased outside investigation of their son’s killing. That’s what the family of every person killed by the police deserves.

Idaho: a safe place with lots of shootings

There are a lot of these families out there because a staggering number of people have been killed by police in Idaho recently.

Since 2015, police have shot and killed 77 people in the Gem State, according to a database maintained by the Washington Post. In Nebraska, the state closest to Idaho in population, there have been only 44 — and Nebraska has higher homicide and violent crime rates than Idaho.

Chicago has more than half a million more people than Idaho and a homicide rate about 10 times higher than Idaho’s. But only 53 fatal officer-involved shootings have happened there since 2015, according to the database.

There are places where officer-involved shootings are more frequent. In New Mexico, a state comparable in population, there have been 184 fatal shootings since 2015. But New Mexico is also a place with far more violent crime — there are about seven homicides there for every one in Idaho, and New Mexico’s violent crime rate is the nation’s second highest, according to the most recent FBI data.

By contrast, Idaho is in the bottom 10% of the nation in terms of homicide rates, according to the CDC, and in the bottom 20% in terms of per capita violent crime, according to FBI data.

All of this suggests that Idaho’s officer-involved shooting rate could be reduced substantially through some combination of stronger accountability and better training. It suggests that the Banachs’ proposal of a regional citizen review board is a reasonable one that lawmakers should take seriously.

“(Jeremy) was a great kid, even though he had a drug problem. … What we want is for this to never happen to another family,” Skip said.

Bryan Clark is an opinion writer for the Idaho Statesman.