Santa Paula police were wrong to kill mountain lion cub, review finds

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Santa Paula police officers who shot and killed a 15-pound mountain lion cub in February acted inappropriately, according to the findings of an external review released this week.

The review determined that the officers should have used different means for handling the situation and noted that ‘no person was placed in immediate jeopardy’ by the cub’s presence. Our colleague Ari B. Bloomekatz reports:

Santa Paula Police Chief Steve MacKinnon said he requested the review. He said that dealing with mountain lions was a new issue for the department. ‘The thing that’s unusual for us is we’ve had no mountain lion calls for the last five years,’ MacKinnon said.Yet the department has received ’21 separate calls in the past six weeks,’ he said.

‘It’s extremely unusual; the experts don’t have an explanation’ for the rash of cougar sightings, he said.

MacKinnon presented the results of the review, conducted by Larry Nichols, a shooting expert with the Burbank Police Department, on Monday to the Santa Paula City Council.

The review included suggestions for what the supervising officer on scene could have done differently, including ordering officers to hold a perimeter and not to ‘engage, corner or agitate [the] mountain lion and to wait until Fish and Game arrived, only to shoot if they are attacked or to protect another person from being attacked.’

While MacKinnon defended the officers involved, noting that they had essentially ‘no training or point of reference in which to manage this call for service,’ he wrote in a memo that the department has taken steps to ensure such actions won’t be repeated in the future.

Officers have been encouraged to use bean bag shotguns as an alternate means of dealing with mountain lions, and senior officers and supervisors have received training from the Mountain Lion Foundation to learn how to properly handle encounters with the big cats.

-- Lindsay Barnett