COLUMBUS, Ohio — Police body-worn camera from Monday night’s officer-involved shooting hasn’t been made public yet, but videos circulating social media give a glimpse into what happened.
One video is taken from the parking lot of the Hadhwanag Somali restaurant along Sullivant Avenue. It’s taken from a distance and shows five police officers surrounding 35-year-old Noel Hernandez. He’s waving his arms in the air and it appears he takes a step forward. That’s when officers fire shots and Hernandez drops to the ground.
The video is grainy and hard to make out what happened. Brian Steel, President of FOP Lodge #9 said don’t believe what people put out on social media because it doesn’t show what all was happening right then and close-up.
“The officer looks at the severity of the crime. He’s going to look at is this individual actively trying to resist? Is he trying to flee? Is this person a danger? A danger to himself, officers or others? Officers are making this decision in a split second,” Steel said.
He said deadly force is never the first option and officers do their best to exhaust all other options first.
“When we get there, there are some things we immediately try to do. We try to use de-escalation techniques. We use time, distance, barrier, whatever we can do to deescalate that situation when it’s safe to do so,” he said. We fall back on our training and our experience. Columbus Division of Police is one of the best trained agencies in the country. These are scenarios we go through in the academy, we go through in-service training. We have use of force exams every single year we have to take.”
The Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation is now handling the investigation into this shooting. According to BCI data, the agency has assisted the Columbus Division of Police in six officer-involved shootings so far in 2024. BCI has been requested on 31 officer-involved shooting requests this year.
In 2023, BCI assisted in the investigation of 12 officer-involved shootings involving the Columbus Division of Police, the most of any agency in the state. There were 58 requests statewide for 2023.
Steel points to the department’s size and volume of calls as to why the numbers are the way they are.
“Columbus is the largest department in the state of Ohio and one of the top 15 largest in the country,” Steel said. “Look at how many runs the Columbus Division of Police takes. You’re taking 500,000 to a million calls for service. The chances of being shot by a Columbus Police officer are still statistically .0028%.”
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