Video: Orem police react after young suspect pulls a weapon

Screen shot, Orem Police Department

OREM, Utah, Oct. 20, 2017 (Gephardt Daily) — The Orem Police Department has released a recording of a late-night incident that could have ended in tragedy after a young suspect pulled a gun at close range.

It turned out to be a BB gun, but officers did not know that at the time. The department posted the following account and video on its Facebook page:

Cpl. Vance and Officer Sillitoe responded to a report of a Suspicious Occupied Vehicle, that was it.

Pretty simple call huh? Well, after talking to the four people in the car (with tinted back windows), Sillitoe was being very cordial to all of the ‘kids’ (they all looked very young) and was in the process of letting them go with no enforcement action being taken except that he found out, the rear passenger was giving him a fake name. What you’re about to see is when Officer Sillitoe starts to confront the kid in the back:

As you can hear at the end, the suspect in this case wanted us to kill him. It didn’t happen.

There are a few points that we are hoping everyone can take from this video:

1. See how fast things can happen and we are left playing “catch up”.
2. This gun ended up being a BB gun but we didn’t know that until after the officer grabbed it out of the suspect’s hands.
3. It looked and sounded like a real gun.
4. Cpl. Vance was too close and his natural reaction was to reach out and take the gun from him.
5. Had he been a bit further away, this may have ended differently because what you can’t see from this angle is that Officer Sillitoe had seen the gun at the last second and drew his handgun but decided not to shoot because Cpl. Vance had gotten too close to the suspect to take him down.
6. This situation is NOT being used to critique any other incident that happened somewhere else. The circumstances here are not the same, none of them are.
7. Every use of force situation is different and can’t be compared to each other.
8. Our officers did everything right, ie. good officer safety positions, good calm demeanor with the occupants, smart tactical sense, etc. These are seasoned officers with both SWAT experience and one with combat experience in the military.
9. Sometimes when people want to do bad things, we can’t prevent it, we can only try to minimize the damage.
10. The officers are glad that both themselves and the suspect ended up being unharmed.

It happens this fast folks. We all know that this is part of our job, doesn’t mean we look forward to it!

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