Tim Steller's column: TPD officer in parking-lot incident 'no angel'

He was “no angel.”

That’s the stereotypical story we often hear after a young man is shot and killed by police. First there is outrage over the shooting, then it turns out the deceased had a criminal record, or at least a troubling background. The implication: Maybe the shooting was justified after all.

In an infamous 2014 example, the New York Times actually published a story about a notorious police killing in Missouri that said “Michael Brown, 18, due to be buried on Monday, was no angel.”

That was a pretty sickening juxtaposition — “due to be buried,” and “no angel.”

Video-recorded incidents of violence by police lead naturally to these stories, because we in the news business don’t usually know anything about the individuals involved, at first. So the follow-up stories cover what we’ve learned about their backgrounds, often emphasizing the negative stuff available in court records.

When the alleged perpetrator is a cop, it turns out, a similar dynamic holds, but it may be a more circuitous path to the “no angel” story, since you can’t have much of a record and remain an officer.

I’ve been thinking of this as we’ve learned more about the case of Tucson police Officer Robert Szelewski, and as other videotaped police incidents have come up in Tucson and elsewhere.

The videos we first see often leave a firm impression of wrongdoing or of righteousness. But then the story gains nuance or is even contradicted by other videos and accounts. What’s left then is for documents and other background material to explain the people or the incident at a depth that gives us a more complete picture.

That’s what’s happening with the story of the Szelewski incident, which I broke on Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. The conflict in the parking lot of the Culinary Dropout restaurant had happened on Nov. 14. About noon, three women — 62-year-old Michelle Aloisi and her adult daughters Nicole Whitted and Brittany Aloisi-Wiles — left the restaurant at 2543 E. Grant Road and crossed the parking lot.

The women said that Szelewski, off-duty with his family and out of uniform, drove into the parking lot fast, stopped short and gestured at them in apparent frustration as they walked past, delayed by a physical impediment Aloisi has. Szelewski parked and got out of his car, and the two daughters exchanged words with him, one of the daughters getting in Szelewski’s space as she confronted him.

It’s unclear who touched who first — a key, disputed detail — but Szelewski quickly took Aloisi-Wiles to the ground, holding her down. Then her mother tried to pull Szelewski off, and he pulled her down too. Eventually a bystander intervened, the sides separated and, incredibly to me, the only person cited for a misdemeanor was Aloisi-Wiles, for disorderly conduct.

It still strikes me that any civilian who had pulled those two women down, however the conflict started, would have received at least one misdemeanor criminal charge, meaning Szelewski likely got a benefit of the doubt thanks to his position.

I hadn’t been able to read the police reports on the incident or watch the grainy surveillance video before that first column came out, because a cyber-snafu prevented TPD’s emails from arriving till the department resent them the following week.

Some people argued I had rushed to judgment against Szelewski. The parking-lot video shows Whitted walking toward Szelewski across the pavement, apparently exchanging words with him, before Aloisi-Wiles cuts between them and gets in Szelewski’s face.

A strong KOLD Channel 13 story in January suggested that the parking-lot video supported the position ultimately taken by police, that Aloisi-Wiles was at fault because she rushed toward Szelewski.

But since then, Tucson police have released Szelewski’s personnel records in response to requests by me and by other news outlets. These swing the pendulum back the other direction, reinforcing the first impressions and telling a “no-angel” story of the officer’s career.

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Hired in June 2004, Szelewski served two suspensions — of 40 and 10 hours — during his first three years on the job.

The longest was for misusing his firearm — when a fellow officer shined a flashlight at him, Szelewski pointed his gun at the colleague and lit him up with the gun’s light. The other was for wrongly detaining a juvenile in a closed room.

Szelewski hasn’t had any suspensions since then, but people have complained repeatedly of him being rude and unnecessarily aggressive.

In 2015, a man whom Szelewski pulled over for a traffic violation told TPD internal investigators that the first words the officer said were “Are you an idiot?” He went on to be loud and needlessly confrontational, the driver said.

In 2018, a man came in to the Office of Professional Standards and said he hated to complain, but he thought Szelewski’s supervisors should know he was unnecessarily condescending and aggressive from the very beginning of a traffic stop.

Also in 2018, a woman from California told TPD she asked Szelewski how she should deal with the speeding ticket he had given her, since she would be going back home out of state. She said his response was “you’ll have to figure that out, won’t you?”

None of these was a huge deal on its own, but together they suggest a pattern of rudeness and aggression, consistent with what happened Nov. 14.

Videos such as the one Whitted took of Szelewski often cause an instant reaction in us, either of outrage or thankfulness. Attorney Mike Storie, who represents Szelewski and other officers facing possible accusations, told me he doesn’t like videos because they almost always give an incomplete picture.

Still, sometimes the videos benefit police. TPD released one Feb. 11 of a shooting that took place Feb. 5 on West Fort Lowell Road. Officer Benjamin Boschee, responding to a report of a man pointing a gun at several people, found the man, told him to drop the gun, warned him “you will be shot,” then fired three shots, striking him.

The man with the weapon that turned out to be a replica gun, Kevin Angelo Lyons, survived. It turns out Lyons has his own “no angel” story. A couple of years ago, on Dec. 26, 2019, he attacked a detention officer in Chandler, trying to choke him with handcuffed hands. He was convicted of aggravated assaulted, sentenced to 18 months in prison and got out in April 2021.

Between the witness reports, the video and that background, it doesn’t feel like a police-violence case to protest — the opposite, in fact.

Of course, Boschee didn’t know Lyons’ background when he fired, and it would be wrong for prosecutors to consider that in weighing whether the shooting was righteous. The facts of the incident will have to stand on their own.

And the same rule should probably apply to Szelewski, who is on administrative assignment in the department. The Pima County Attorney’s Office is reevaluating the Nov. 14 incident to be sure he didn’t merit a criminal citation, and there’s plenty of information available.

His troubling pattern of complaints probably shouldn’t play into their charging decision, but it can fairly influence how you and I see the case, and how the department responds in its administrative review. Whether for an officer or someone shot by an officer, the background is part of the bigger story.