The Oregon State Police criminal investigation of two SWAT sergeants in 2013 for their misconduct during a ski trip exposed other controversial behavior by SWAT team members: a so-called SWAT pop and firing at coyotes and other animals.
State police Superintendent Casey Codding acknowledged that those actions were “clearly inappropriate.” State police have changed their policies to prohibit officers from firing their duty firearms outside of their official duties, he said.
Codding wasn’t involved in either of those actions, according to the investigation.
He was a member of the SWAT team at the time of the SWAT pop and became one of its sergeants in 2013. He was reprimanded for allowing subordinates to drink alcohol beside him in a state police truck on the ski trip.
He declined to discuss the investigation’s findings about his SWAT colleagues. “I have an obligation to be careful,” he said.
The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained the investigative report from the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office, which reviewed the investigation’s findings but declined to file any charges. The details haven’t been disclosed before now.
THE “SWAT POP”
Joey Pollard, the SWAT sergeant investigated for the ski trip along with Codding, was a rank-and-file team member in 2010 when he fired a shot behind a newer team member, Trooper Will Brindza, in what was dubbed a “SWAT pop,” a joke to startle him.
The gunshot occurred as officers walked back to state police trucks after “scouting” acres of an abandoned marijuana field in Wheeler County.
Brindza told investigators the shot whizzed by about 30 yards above and behind him. He dropped to the ground on his right shoulder when he heard it. As he looked back, he said, he saw Pollard holding a .40-caliber pistol in his hand.
Brindza called Pollard’s actions “negligent and unprofessional,” according to the 2013 state police criminal investigation report. He said he had been on the team only a year and “didn’t want to make waves,” so he didn’t report it.
Pollard told him to relax and suggested it was something “that happened in the past,” Brindza recalled.
No one at the time complained about the shot, according to the troopers who witnessed it.
“Maybe we cowboy around a little bit … and when we do … we have it comin’, hey, we’ll take it,” said Trooper Scott Show, one of the witnesses. After it occurred, he told investigators that he hadn’t heard “boo about it.”
Timothy Fox was the SWAT lieutenant in 2010 but was later moved off the team to a patrol position in Salem.
Lt. Bill Fugate, who became the SWAT commander in October 2012, told investigators he had heard the term “SWAT pop” from another team member that it may have occurred during a marijuana scouting mission.
Fugate said he made it clear to the team’s supervisors at a training at Camp Rilea in November 2012 that SWAT members were to fire their guns only during training or in the course of their official police duties.
Pollard, who had been promoted to sergeant on SWAT in January 2013, was demoted to trooper in May 2013 after the criminal investigation and resulting internal investigation into his and other SWAT members’ actions.
SHOOTING ANIMALS
Brindza and other SWAT members also told investigators that Pollard had stopped on the side of a rural road in Baker County in summer 2010, yelled “dog, dog, dog,” grabbed an AR-15 rifle and fired at a coyote from the side of the road beside his stopped state police truck.
Brindza said Pollard often bragged about firing at animals from the road or from state police vehicles and encouraged others to do it, according to the investigation.
Trooper Show told investigators that he also rode in SWAT vehicles when team members fired guns out of the windows at “critters” in the middle of nowhere.
He said Codding, when he was a member of SWAT before he became a sergeant, had cautioned the team during a training, “hey, you guys, you know, if you shoot an animal, whether it be a road-struck animal or whatever, make sure that your stuff is squared away.”
That warning from Codding, Show said, came after another SWAT member, David Stone, had been asked to account for all the rounds he fired just before his involvement in a stakeout in 2012 where 18-year-old Samuel Augustus Mullane was killed near Yachats, according to the records.
Investigators found Stone had fired “an unknown number of rounds” from his AR-15 rifle at a location sometime before the Yachats shooting, though the records don’t specify why, according to the investigative report into Mullane’s shooting. As a result, Stone couldn’t tell investigators after the fatal shooting how many rounds his rifle held at the start of the stakeout.
Stone was one of three SWAT members, including Codding, who fired at Mullane at the 2012 stakeout, killing him.
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