After years of high-profile shootings, policing in America is under more scrutiny than at any time in our history. Meanwhile, one company—which sells policy handbooks to police departments across the country—seems determined to give officers cover.
Nicholas Pimentel, a twenty-seven-year-old restaurant cook, was driving his pickup truck home from a bar in Ceres, California, when police pulled him over for a traffic stop. But Pimentel didn’t stop, instead leading the cops on a high-speed chase, which ended when police blocked his path around the corner from his house. His truck spun out. After Ceres police officer Ross Bays rammed the driver’s side with his patrol car, body-cam footage from another officer shows Pimentel’s engine continuing to rev and the truck’s wheels spinning in place as it was stuck between Bays’s cruiser and a parked car. Bays fired his gun into the vehicle at Pimentel, then another officer did, too.
Ten months later, Carmen “Spencer” Mendez, fifteen, was a passenger in a black Lexus that led Ceres police on a chase following reports that one of the occupants had been seen with a gun at a local park. The same officer, Ross Bays, sped through the almond orchards that surround Ceres before pulling off the road behind the Lexus as it slowed. On the body-cam recording of the incident, Mendez, an athletic ninth grader who loved football, tumbles out in a barrel roll, somersaults to his feet, and takes off into an orchard at a sprint. Bays opens his door as his cruiser comes to a stop. In the video, a tattoo of a Blue Lives Matter flag is visible on Bays’s left forearm as he raises his weapon.
Three seconds after exiting the vehicle, he fires sixteen rounds without warning, then shouts, “Get on the ground, get on the ground!” The video isn’t clear, but in a later interview with the Ceres PD’s internal-affairs department, Bays said he saw Mendez carrying a gun as he ran away and that he feared a potential ambush or even hostage situation. “As he starts running away from me, he’s creating distance between us far beyond my ability to stop this threat,” he said.
Police shootings are usually followed by two separate investigations: an internal-affairs review to determine whether officers violated department policies and a criminal investigation in which prosecutors decide whether they have violated the law. In both the Pimentel and Mendez cases, the district attorney’s office declined to seek an indictment of Bays, ruling that both shootings were justified under the Supreme Court standard set forth in the 1989 case Graham v. Connor: “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.”
Inside the Ceres Police Department, successive internal-affairs investigations exonerated Bays based on the department’s policies on vehicular chases and use of force. Bays’s body camera was off when he fired at Pimentel; in the footage from another officer’s camera, it’s difficult to make out whether the truck actually moved, but Bays told internal-affairs investigators that Pimentel was steering toward him and that he “made eye contact,” which Bays interpreted as a threat.
In the Mendez case, the investigators concluded that Bays fired “fearing that Carmen Mendez could circle back under the cover of the orchard to ambush and kill him, coupled with the fact that Carmen Mendez was running in the general direction of a nearby farmhouse where he could potentially harm an innocent bystander.” The police chief, Rick Collins, told The Ceres Courier that shooting someone in the back was “not necessarily” against police policy.
Which was astonishing.
Astonishing then, and even more so now, almost two years after the murder of George Floyd, at this tense and consequential moment in the history of the republic, when the very existence of the system of law enforcement that holds together a civil society is being questioned. In many cities, the movement to reconsider the role of police and their methods has risen to a cry for seismic police reforms or, in some places, for defunding the police entirely.
But in fact, reform is slow, and not much is happening. Reforms mean change. Reforms mean rules that govern when cops can draw their gun, when they can’t, what they have to report every time their weapon leaves the holster.
Reforms mean accountability.
Every police department has a policy manual, a written code of conduct that governs its officers, including rules of engagement that spell out when an officer can or cannot use lethal force. These manuals are updated from time to time—to reflect changes in state law, or Supreme Court rulings in cases involving police conduct, or technological innovations like body cams and Tasers. Lots of reasons.
When crafting policy in the first place, police departments can go one of two ways: They can require that officers do only what is required by law in any given situation, or they can go above and beyond what the law requires, writing so-called bright-line rules that make clear what an officer can and can’t do.
For example, if the law stipulates that an officer can fire at a suspect who’s running away if the officer fears for his or her life, and the policy stops there, a lot falls to the officer’s discretion. So a department might try to write policy that spells out what it means to fear for your life, and it might write rules requiring that the officer issue a verbal warning or try using a dog before resorting to a gun.
Chief Collins? He was absolutely correct. The Ceres Police Department bought its manual from a company called Lexipol, which has made a cottage industry of writing manuals that are widely recognized as being police friendly, marketing them using taglines like “Is Your Use of Force Policy Properly Protecting You?” Lexipol says it creates policies that mirror the law rather than factors like, say, public opinion or the research demonstrating that more rules governing the use of force result in fewer people being dead. The company writes “legally defensible” policies, it says, that “mitigate risk.”
This article appeared in the March 2022 issue of Esquire
When the Pimentel and Mendez families sued the city, the lawyer who represented Ceres in both cases was a private defense attorney named Bruce Praet, who has built his legal career on representing police officers and departments accused of breaking the law, including many fatal shootings. (Praet is a former police officer himself.) Together, the settlements to the two families totaled more than $4 million—more than a quarter of the Ceres Police Department’s annual budget. But much of that would be paid by the city’s insurance, and the settlements avoided the possibility of messy trials or even larger jury awards. Two young men in one small town had been killed by a single officer within a year, but the police department could go on as though nothing had happened. Ross Bays retired to Idaho.
Lexipol provides policy manuals to thirty-five hundred of the eighteen thousand police departments in the United States. That’s almost one in five police departments in this country that operate under Lexipol guidelines.
One cofounder of Lexipol?
Bruce Praet.
In the months after Spencer Mendez was killed, his mother, Stephanie Beidleman, who installs displays at grocery chains and big-box stores, returned again and again to the footage of her son’s last moments.
“I freeze-framed every pixel of that video,” she says, desperate for some understanding of the sequence that left her youngest, four months past his fifteenth birthday, bleeding out in an almond orchard. Police said they recovered a weapon near where Spencer was shot, but Beidleman couldn’t make sense of it. The report of someone holding a firearm at the park described a suspect dressed in black, not a white top and red pants, like Spencer was wearing.
“My son was running away from him, not toward him,” she says, referring to Bays. “Away from him.”
Bays said he feared Spencer could double back and ambush him. Another potential threat came from the people who remained in the car, all of them just as near to Bays, with a clear line of sight if they wanted to do him harm. When Bays began firing without shouting a warning, Spencer was close to fifty feet away on the opposite side of the vehicle, running into the orchard.
Bays stepped out into the open, giving up the protection of his SUV and its ballistic doors, and fired round after round. And only then did he say, “Get on the ground.”
Why didn’t he use the dog?
That’s the question—one of the endless questions—Beidleman asks herself over and over. She’d been out to that orchard the day Spencer was killed and gotten as far as the caution tape, then sat on the side of the road for four or five hours. She couldn’t help but think, The officer had choices. There was a trained police dog in the back seat of Bays’s SUV. Why not send the dog after Spencer instead of just gunning him down? The dog might have hurt her baby. Might have bitten him hard. But at least her baby might still be alive.
Founded as a spin-off of Praet’s legal practice in 2003, Lexipol has become the dominant player in police policymaking nationwide. The company’s pitch to police departments is alluringly simple: For a flat fee based on a department’s number of officers—often running from thousands to tens of thousands of dollars—it will write a “customizable, reliable, and regularly updated” code of conduct that complies with legal standards while, Lexipol says, minimizing liability. Lexipol says its clients face fewer lawsuits in cases when an officer is accused of unnecessary shootings and resolve them with smaller payouts; many municipal insurers and risk pools subsidize subscriptions to Lexipol, sometimes paying 100 percent of the fee. Ceres’s Lexipol subscription, for example, is paid for through its premiums to the Central San Joaquin Valley Risk Management Authority.
Neither Praet nor Lexipol responded to multiple interview requests for this story. The city of Ceres declined to comment on the Mendez and Pimentel shootings, as well as on the city’s relationship with Lexipol and Praet. This article is based on interviews with more than sixty people, including law enforcement and elected officials, legal scholars, policy and risk-management experts, insurers, and Lexipol customers and former employees, as well as family members of people injured or killed by police represented by Praet, their attorneys, and Praet’s siblings and former classmates. In addition, I reviewed numerous federal cases in which Praet served as an attorney; contracts, manuals, and individual policies from dozens of Lexipol subscribers; Lexipol trainings, marketing materials, and correspondence with police agencies; and minutes and video from public meetings discussing the company’s offerings.
Lexipol has positioned itself as a simple solution to a longstanding problem: Policy manuals are supposed to function as a department’s bible for operations, but they take time and money to produce and can get “severely outdated” over time, as one of Lexipol’s marketing refrains says. Drafting new policy can be a daunting process, and most places don’t have a public body whose job it is to do it. (Joseph Marshall, who spent more than a decade on the civilian police commission in San Francisco, compares drafting police-policy language to “getting a bill through Congress.”)
That’s partly why, historically, many police departments crib policies from other cities. When Jim Burch, now the president of the nonprofit National Police Foundation, was assigned to write policy for his suburban Maryland department in the 1980s, a supervisor dropped three thick manuals on his desk. “Here’s Los Angeles, here’s Baltimore, and here’s Fairfax County,” he said. “Just find their policies, pick one that you think is best, and put our name on top.”
But that approach has risks: Choose the wrong department to copy, Burch says, and you could wind up on the wrong side of recent case law. When Lexipol takes on a police department as a client and writes its policy manual, the company also acts as the steward of the basic manual going forward, sending out revisions for the department to review and adopt, just like Microsoft auto-updating your software.
All for a fraction of a single officer’s salary.
Nearly half of the eighteen thousand distinct law-enforcement agencies in the country employ ten officers or fewer. Beyond the basics, there is little coherence in police policies from town to town when it comes to definitions, data collection, procedure, or much else. Bill Bratton, who served as police commissioner in Boston and New York and chief of police in Los Angeles, compares the U. S. police-policy landscape to the Tower of Babel. “The great weakness of American policing is that we have so few national policies,” he says—even on something as basic as tallying the annual number of fatal police shootings.
“You have all these agencies looking for what works,” says Chuck Wexler, who runs the Police Executive Research Forum, a think tank established in 1976 to foster “professionalism in policing,” including reducing the use of force. “If you look at the commitment we make relative to other countries, it’s minuscule.”
That makes outsourcing to Lexipol an attractive option for many departments. A policy manual can run four hundred pages or more, full of regulations meant to comply not only with case law but with insurance requirements—policies on sexual harassment, sick leave, lactation breaks, social media.
Once a policy is in place, Lexipol makes it easy for departments to keep it current. In Santa Maria, California, a Lexipol customer, the official responsible for training once emailed a Lexipol rep asking whether he could simply accept automatic policy updates without further modification: “Do I need to do anything after that, other than putting it into ‘approved’?”
Lexipol has sometimes resisted and spoken out against reforms intended to increase police accountability. In 2017, when the International Association of Chiefs of Police released the National Consensus Policy on Use of Force—a new framework to help agencies reduce police violence—Praet responded by writing a blog post for Lexipol. His headline: “National Consensus Policy on Use of Force Should Not Trigger Changes to Agency Policies.” He cautioned against requiring de-escalation, a method for reducing use of force by giving clear instructions, avoiding physical confrontation, or waiting it out while a suspect calms down. Praet wrote, “While ‘de-escalation’ has become the latest buzzword and is conceptually advisable, agencies must exercise extreme caution when mandating action with the use of inflexible ‘shalls.’ ” Meaning that if, in order to decrease the likelihood of violent encounters, a department’s policy requires or prohibits certain behavior on the part of its officers (those “inflexible ‘shalls’ ”)—and then an officer is accused of violating the policy—a department’s legal exposure increases. Lexipol’s answer is to—as much as possible—avoid requiring police to de-escalate, thus leaving such matters to an officer’s discretion and judgment.
This kind of thinking is aimed at minimizing liability, not making policing better, according to former Sacramento police chief Rick Braziel, who says that relying on Lexipol can make departments complacent. “Lexipol makes sure that all the legal mandates are in there—all the stuff’s in there to say that I’m doing it legally,” says Braziel, who has reviewed Lexipol policies as a consultant to police departments on use of force. “They don’t have in there, though, that you’re doing it correctly, morally, or ethically. You’re just doing it legally.”
Three years ago, in early 2019, lawmakers in California were drafting AB 392, known as the California Act to Save Lives, a bill that would revise use-of-force standards for police across the state. When it was first introduced, in February of that year, AB 392 included language that would have required officers to consider whether deadly force was “necessary,” and to rely on tactics like creating distance or taking cover to avoid shooting.
Necessary, in that early version of the bill, meant that an officer saw “no reasonable alternative to the use of deadly force.” By the time the bill passed that summer, it still limited deadly force to situations where it was “necessary,” but that meant only that an officer “reasonably believes” it necessary. Language about seeing “no reasonable alternative” to deadly force was gone. Where there had originally been two references to the Supreme Court’s “objective reasonableness” standard, there were now five. The legal bar for shooting someone was getting lower, not higher.
After the bill passed, Praet gave a webinar for Lexipol subscribers in which he took some credit for this result. “When we were dealing with legislators, one of the last things that we, law enforcement, threw in was a qualifier in that paragraph (b), which says, ‘As set forth below.’ ‘As set forth below,’ you’ll now see, is exactly Graham v. Connor,” he said.
In other words, he explained, “the new standard is the exact same thing we’ve had for the last fifty years.”
After a while, Praet asked the class, “You notice a theme here? That we retained all of the reasonable?” Lexipol had pecked and scratched at the bill’s language, the way a lobbyist might, and in the end the bill scaled back the requirement that deadly force be used only when necessary, period.
This kind of hedging is a hallmark of Lexipol policies: “Our secret sauce, so to speak, is rarely, if ever, will you see the word shall in our policies,” Praet said. Instead, Lexipol policies are peppered with should and may, their edges smoothed by dependent clauses laying out broad caveats: If reasonably safe and feasible . . . To the extent that it is reasonably practical . . .
“If an agency ill-advisedly said, ‘You shall or shall not based on certain circumstances,’ yeah, you’d be hanging out there on a very thin limb,” Praet said. Don’t introduce any bright-line rules that the law doesn’t force you to.
Some police-department policies voluntarily use a higher standard than what the law requires. In New York City, for example, the NYPD said in 1972 that officers could no longer shoot into moving vehicles to avoid being run over—they’d have to get out of the way instead. Other departments banned choke holds long before the wave of state laws passed after Eric Garner and George Floyd were killed.
“The good news,” Praet said, “is here at Lexipol, our policies mirror the law.” He assured those watching the webinar that the company was “one hundred miles ahead of this,” referring to AB 392. He added, “Those of you not with Lexipol, you’ll just have to sign up.”
Fred Smith, a professor of constitutional law at Emory University’s law school, says this approach does not necessarily lead to better policing. He zeroed in on Lexipol’s claims of providing “legally defensible” policies that “mitigate risk.” “I think for most cities, the question is, How do we let police officers act to the full extent of what the Supreme Court allows without running into liability? So the incentive structure is that that would be the question Lexipol is answering,” he says. “And if that’s the question, that’s not going to lead to safety with justice.”
He adds, “As a society, we’re asking a question that’s not a legal question anymore; we’re asking police departments to act better than the Supreme Court allows.”
A few months after Praet’s webinar, as AB 392 took effect, Lexipol updated police policy manuals across California to reflect the new use-of-force guidelines, though as Praet had proudly told his audience, they weren’t really new at all.
The youngest of four children, Bruce Praet was raised outside Deerfield, Illinois, until his family moved to Phoenix, where his father built an auto-transmissions business. Growing up, family members say, Praet dreamed of being a veterinarian. In high school, his brother Jim recalls, he volunteered for the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department through his Boy Scout troop and ended up on a detail responsible for identifying dead bodies at the scenes of murders and fatal car accidents.
Phone calls from the sheriff’s department came in at all hours, and Praet brought home grisly photos he arranged in scrapbooks. “Whatever he gets into, he takes it full bore,” Jim says. “I dropped out in Cub Scouts; Bruce went on to be an Eagle Scout.”
After high school, Praet moved to California to live with his eldest sister and signed up as a police cadet while studying for his associate’s degree in administration of justice at Saddleback Junior College. He finished at the top of his academy class. When, in 1973, California lowered the minimum age for officers from twenty-one to eighteen, Laguna Beach hired Praet as one of the youngest police officers in the state.
The following year, Praet found a job that would combine two of his teenage ambitions—animal care and law enforcement—as a police canine handler in nearby Orange, where he still lives. Other officers kenneled their dogs at work, but he brought his partner home each night. When the dog died, Praet’s sister Carole recalls, the chief didn’t understand why he was so upset over a “stupid dog.”
According to a 1994 New York Times story about police officers who became lawyers, Praet recounted two occasions on which he was sued in the eleven years he served on the force. First, “by the family of a kidnapping suspect he had shot, and by a bank robbery suspect he had detained, questioned, and photographed as she loitered in a bank that had recently been robbed,” the Times reported.
“I know how an officer feels when he has to trust a bunch of lawyers to defend him after all he did was defend himself,” Praet told the reporter for that story. “I know what it feels like from the moment he pulls the trigger. I’ve been there, and it’s something to be avoided.”
Praet, at least, had an attorney he trusted: Michael Stone, who would later win acquittals on all but one federal charge for one of the four LAPD officers who beat Rodney King. It was Stone who encouraged Praet to go to law school and who hired him as a clerk. Soon after, Praet defended police for the LAPD’s union and then served as an attorney for the city of Orange, where he had spent most of his career in law enforcement.
In 1987, Praet joined with two other attorneys to launch Ferguson, Praet & Sherman, a firm that defends police in civil matters and management in personnel cases, where he still works. (It remains a separate entity from Lexipol.) He developed a reputation as an aggressive, capable attorney.
Then a few years later, in 1993, after a setback in court, Praet had an idea.
Praet was representing the city of Perris, California. A bystander had been killed as police chased a truck that ran a stop sign, and the bystander’s family sued the city. State law gave towns immunity from damages stemming from car chases as long as they had adequate “vehicular pursuit” policies. But in this case the dead man’s family claimed the policy was too vague to be covered by the law—specifically, it didn’t spell out when police were allowed to give chase. On that issue, the family won.
Praet began offering his services to towns and cities, writing vehicular-pursuit policies that would better shield them from liability. Soon he was drafting entire police policy manuals, which he printed in three-ring binders and marketed to small Central Valley police agencies that didn’t have the staff or expertise to draft complex documents in-house.
“The idea was, well, if we write these policies and give them to a law-enforcement officer, then, when [the department] gets sued, they’re insulated from civil damages,” says Ingrid Eagly, the faculty director of the criminal-justice program at UCLA’s law school, who has coauthored two papers on Lexipol’s role in police policymaking, one of them titled “Lexipol’s Fight Against Police Reform.” “His practice then really started to grow from there. Now everyone wanted to have this policy—and I think that’s sort of the core idea behind all of the policies.”
In 2000, a mutual friend introduced Praet to Dan Merkle, a businessman and fellow Eagle Scout who came up with the name Lexipol and signed on as the company’s CEO. The third cofounder was another police officer turned lawyer, Gordon Graham—also renowned as a speaker and trainer on risk management. Graham had developed safety trainings for the California Highway Patrol and consulted with clients in industries ranging from commercial real estate to auto-racing operations, according to his website. He brought experience and a network that extended beyond law enforcement to the world of insurance.
With Praet’s policy manual as a template, the trio hired a team of engineers to develop a software platform that would allow subscribers to customize their policies. Policy language was color coded according to the basis for the underlying legal reasoning: red for federal law, orange for state statute, yellow for best practices.
To develop new policies and refine them with customers, Merkle told me, Lexipol brought in retired California cops. The company later replicated this strategy as it expanded across the country, employing retired police executives to work with their peers and former colleagues. Lexipol executives spoke at risk-management conferences and offered discounts that municipal insurers could pass on to their customers.
Jason McMahon, a risk-management director who provides liability coverage for a pool of about one hundred local governments at Midwest Public Risk, says part of Lexipol’s appeal lies in the importance of a good paper trail: “I don’t know that a parking lot’s safer because we can document that we put salt down to melt the ice. But I’ll tell you, if someone slips and falls, you’re a lot better off if you can show them you put salt down.”
Merkle, who served as Lexipol CEO until 2012, sometimes described Praet’s vision for the company in the same way. At a 2009 meeting of the commission that certifies police training materials in California, Merkle explained that the idea for Lexipol went back to a trend Praet noticed among plaintiffs’ attorneys. “If they couldn’t win on the facts of a case against an agency, they would go after their training records, their policy manuals, their procedure records,” Merkle said. “Agencies who had good shootings”—justifiable according to the rules—“were being compromised because their administrative tasks were not up-to-date.” In other words, it wasn’t the shootings that were a problem but the paperwork. Merkle says Praet’s plan for Lexipol was to “take away that tactic”—write policies with fewer rules, and in the eyes of a jury, more shootings would be good shootings.
By all accounts, Praet drives a hard bargain on behalf of the cities that hire him. John Burris, a Bay Area civil-rights lawyer who has faced Praet in multiple cases, describes him as a “true believer” and a “lowball guy, as a matter of practice.”
Ron Thomas, a retired Orange County sheriff’s deputy, met Praet in 2011, weeks after Thomas’s son Kelly was beaten into a coma by officers in Fullerton, California, and died of his injuries. Kelly, who had schizophrenia and lived on and off the streets for years, had had dozens of encounters with police. As Thomas recalls, Praet invited him to lunch with the city manager before Thomas had even decided to a file a lawsuit. It was an awkward encounter. Thomas heard nothing he considered a true apology, but he agreed to a second meeting in Praet’s law office. Thomas found him arrogant, and when he didn’t accept Praet’s offer totaling $900,000, he says, Praet replied, “Come on, your son was no rocket scientist.”
The case ultimately settled for $4.9 million.
Lexipol was acquired by a private-equity company in 2014; Praet retained an ownership interest and a seat on the board. Through a merger with Praetorian Digital, a “leading content and learning platform,” Lexipol brought on a sales team with expertise in software as a service and digital trade publications like Police1.com. It introduced tiered pricing for different sections of its standard police manual and began charging departments for help applying for state and federal grants that could pay for—among other things—a subscription to Lexipol policies.
The overlap between Praet’s law firm and Lexipol has continued. All eighteen California cities where Praet has worked on at least three federal lawsuits are current Lexipol customers, and his law firm’s “client alerts” sometimes refer to the advantages of a Lexipol subscription.
No city has given Praet more business than Fresno, where he has litigated twenty-six federal civil-rights cases on behalf of the police department since 2005. One person who has gotten to study those case records in detail is Roger Clark, who worked as an expert witness for two different families that sued Fresno in connection with police shootings. In the second case, Praet represented the city; in preparation for his deposition in the case, Clark reviewed fifty-one police shootings in Fresno, including the internal-investigation files. Of the fifty-one, he concluded, sixteen people who were shot were unarmed, and nine were fleeing. In no case did Clark find that a Fresno police officer was disciplined for a shooting in which someone was injured or killed. The vast majority were deemed “within policy.”
(Praet challenged the report, arguing that Clark had relied on sealed documents from the first case that he wasn’t supposed to use. Praet’s challenge was successful: Clark was sanctioned by the judge for using the sealed information, and the jury never saw his report.)
Clark’s report did not mention Lexipol, but he told me that Lexipol’s most important policy contribution was “not so much what it says as what it doesn’t say.” Fresno didn’t prohibit shooting at moving vehicles; it advised that it’s “rarely effective and can be hazardous.” Nor did it outline what is known as a use-of-force continuum, a system that encourages de-escalation and instructs officers to use the least force possible. Its policy on electronic control devices like Tasers asked officers only to consider things like “whether verbal commands, other options, or tactics may be more effective” before giving multiple shocks.
In a 2016 Lexipol webinar called “Still Clinging to a Use of Force Continuum or Labeling Force Levels? You’re at Risk!” Praet underscored his belief that a use-of-force continuum is “hogwash,” presenting his interpretation of Supreme Court case law on the subject: “I don’t care if you run him over with your police car. I don’t care if you smack him with your baton, choke him out, tase him, bite him, shoot him. One question: Was it objectively reasonable under the totality of the circumstances presented at the time?” The question is not whether a life needed to be taken. The question is only whether a policy can be written to justify it.
Lexipol’s leaders aren’t elected. They aren’t required to disclose who drafts their policy language or justify the choices they make on the page. And while Lexipol’s direct sales are to police departments, in a way we are all customers. Praet has spent his career firmly on the side of law enforcement. And in the years since the very public killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, at an American moment that has seemed ripe for a wholesale reassessment of the role of policing in society, Bruce Praet and the company he cofounded stand not only as a barrier to reform but as a bulwark for the status quo.
I contacted several plaintiffs’ attorneys who had litigated against Praet and was surprised to find that they had no idea of Praet’s involvement in Lexipol. The same was true of Miguel Arias, a Fresno city-council member who has taken issue with the legal approach advocated by Praet and police leadership. (Fresno’s current mayor is its former police chief.) It’s a strategy Arias describes as “demean the victim of the use of force, and then double down on the city’s policies,” avoiding settlements and policy changes on the grounds that admitting blame would only invite more litigation.
“In my view, the most important question is, Has that legal strategy saved lives? And the answer is no. Has it prevented more shootings and use-of-force incidents? No. It has protected the system from reforming itself, which has led to more cases, and then more litigation,” says Arias, who was elected in 2018.
Fresno has provided $49 million in new funding for the police department over the past three years. Arias says the vast majority has gone to litigation, salary increases, and cost-of-living adjustments negotiated with the union, rather than putting additional officers on the street.
Arias says he hadn’t been aware of Praet’s stake in Lexipol until I called him. Reflecting on recent cases, he says that if he had known that fact, “that would have been enough for me to insist on a different counsel.” He explains why: “Sometimes the perception of a conflict is just as undermining as a legal conflict is, especially when you’re recommending a strategy on a multimillion-dollar case that’s about to go to trial.”
To this day, Spencer Mendez’s mother, Stephanie Beidleman, says no one from the city of Ceres has ever contacted her about her son’s death. There was no letter, no knock at the door, no return of his clothing. There’s no Lexipol policy at all for how to deal with grieving families.
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