Guest Opinion | Paul Vernon: Pasadena Police Video Demands More Than Soft Language

[UPDATED] The recently released Pasadena Police Department video of an officer shooting another officer in the department parking structure should trouble the public for reasons far beyond the injury itself. 

This was not merely an “accidental” shooting. That word is too soft. Accidents happen when a mechanical defect occurs, when a person trips, or when some unforeseeable event intervenes. What the video appears to show is something more direct and more serious: a negligent discharge involving officers who had no business pointing loaded handguns at one another. 

Nor should this be minimized as “horseplay.” 

Words matter, especially when they come from a police chief. Calling this “horseplay” may be intended to distinguish the incident from a malicious shooting, but it also risks trivializing what the public is seeing. Horseplay is what boys do in a locker room. It is not what mature, trained, armed police officers should be doing in uniform, at the start of watch, inside a police facility, with loaded weapons. 

The better words are plain ones: juvenile, immature, reckless, and unprofessional. At minimum, the conduct shown on the video appears to violate the most basic rules of firearms safety, rules drilled into every police recruit before he or she is ever trusted with a gun. 

Treat every firearm as if it is loaded. Always point the muzzle in a safe direction. Keep your finger off the trigger until ready to shoot. Be sure of your target and what is beyond it. Handle firearms responsibly at all times. 

These are not advanced tactical concepts. They are the foundation. They are recited so often in police training that they should become reflexive. Violate one of them and you create risk. Violate several at once and the outcome should surprise no one.

What disturbed me most, watching as a retired police captain, was not only the conduct of the two involved officers. It was the apparent absence of shock from another officer nearby when one officer unholstered and pointed his gun toward the officer seated in the car. There is no obvious “What the hell are you doing?” moment. No immediate visible rejection of the behavior. No instinctive shaming of the act. 

That matters. 

As a young LAPD officer, I once saw an officer jokingly draw down inside the Rampart roll call room. The reaction was instant. Senior officers erupted. The officer drawing his gun was shamed into holstering, and then escorted by a senior officer to the watch commander. There was no committee meeting, no careful wordsmithing, no “boys will be boys” framing. Everyone in that room understood the line that had been crossed and the officers enforced themselves because that was the culture on that matter. 

Every profession has conduct that is simply not tolerated. For police officers, pointing loaded guns at one another for amusement is one of those lines. 

The Pasadena video also raises a leadership question: where were the sergeants? 

Maybe no supervisor could have stopped the initial stupidity. But the broader issue is culture, and culture is built by supervision. In patrol, sergeants cannot lead from behind a desk. They have to be present where officers gather, where cars are loaded, where off-going units check in and on-coming units prepare to deploy. 

As a watch commander, I expected a sergeant from the on-coming watch to be in the parking lot after roll call. That sergeant had two jobs. First, check in off-going units, make sure everyone was accounted for, and determine whether overtime was truly necessary. Second, set the tone. Presence matters. Officers behave differently when real supervisors are around. And as the lieutenant, I had to ensure my sergeants followed my expectations on check-in. Some had to be reminded, even scolded. Eventually they all got it.

The check-in process has deep roots in LAPD history. After the Onion Field incident, in which two officers were kidnapped during a night shift and one was murdered, LAPD learned the hard way that accounting for officers is not bureaucracy. It is survival. 

There is another lesson from LAPD history. In the 1980s, the Hollywood Burglars scandal exposed a clique of officers who stole from burglary scenes and eventually committed burglaries themselves. One lesson was unmistakable: misconduct grows in a vacuum of poor leadership. The officers later understood which sergeants they could offend around and which ones they could not. Weak supervisors wanted to be liked. Strong supervisors set standards, but they were never disliked. They were respected. 

That is the issue here. Not just two officers. Not just one gunshot. Standards and organizational culture. 

Chief Gene Harris also owes the public a fuller explanation for the delayed release of the video. California law generally contemplates release of critical incident recordings within 45 days, while allowing delay when disclosure would substantially interfere with an investigation. That authority exists for good reason. Due process matters. Investigative integrity matters. 

But so does public confidence. 

This incident occurred September 7, 2025. The video was not released until June 10, 2026. That is more than 250 days later. For a video showing uniformed officers engaging in reckless gun handling inside a police facility, the public deserved a stronger and earlier message. The department also deserved one. 

I understand the officer who fired the round has been terminated. I do not know when that decision was made. But if it were made soon after the incident, it would have sent a needed message of decisiveness and courage. 

Whenever that date was, the termination itself matters. It represented a judgment by the department that the conduct was serious enough to end an officer’s career. And in my view, it was the right judgment.

That also raises the harder question: once the department reached that conclusion, what reason remained to delay release of the video? Due process and investigative integrity are legitimate concerns. But termination is not a neutral administrative step. It is a final, serious judgment about conduct. Once that judgment had been made, the public deserved to see the video and hear from the department plainly, directly, and without euphemism. 

Leadership is not waiting until criticism is unavoidable. It is acting quickly, deliberately, and without fear of public reckoning. It is telling the community, and the officers who still wear the badge, that pointing loaded handguns at fellow officers is not horseplay. It is a firing offense. 

The chief’s statement says this conduct is not consistent with the standards of the department. Good. But that statement would have carried more weight months ago, accompanied by decisive visible action and language that matched the seriousness of what occurred. 

The people of Pasadena should not be left with euphemisms. This was not horseplay. It was a negligent shooting born from a collapse of firearms discipline and professional judgment. The video should prompt more than embarrassment. It should prompt hard questions about supervision, culture, accountability, and whether Pasadena police leadership is willing to say plainly what every firearms instructor already knows: 

Loaded guns are not toys. Not ever. 

Paul Vernon is a former Pasadena police oversight commissioner and retired police officer,