Jennifer Cruz v. the City of Anaheim

Nobody likes a game of “he said, she said,” but far worse is the game of “we said, he’s dead.” Sadly, this is too often what we face in police shooting cases like this one.

I.

In early December 2009, a confidential informant told Anaheim police officer Nathan Stauber that Ceasar Cruz was a gang member who sold methamphetamine and carried a gun. Following this lead, Stau-ber determined that Cruz was a discharged parolee whose prior convictions included a felony involving a firearm. Later, the informant told Stauber where Cruz was, what his vehicle looked like and that he was armed with a nine-millimeter. The informant also reported that Cruz was carrying the gun in his waistband and had made it clear that “he was not going back to prison.” Stauber sent this information out to several other Anaheim police officers and they converged on Cruz’s location with multiple police vehicles, both marked and unmarked.

The officers noticed that Cruz’s vehicle had a broken tail light, so they executed a traffic stop. After Cruz pulled into a Wal-mart parking lot, the police surrounded him with their vehicles. But Cruz attempted to escape, backing his SUV into one of the marked patrol…