'Thank God for all involved': SARPD police chief on why her officers didn't shoot back

There's no telling if a gun is real when it's pointed directly at you, Jen Lyon said.

If it's hot pink or bright blue — if the barrel is capped with an orange tip — that doesn’t mean it’s a toy. If it looks like a gun and sounds like a gun, that doesn’t mean it’s real, either.

It's an impossible distinction for officers to make, the police chief said, and they often have just a second to decide how to respond.

Last Wednesday, a man aimed what looked like a black hand gun across a Walmart parking lot in East Stroudsburg and fired again and again at the Stroud Area Regional Police officers gathered there to arrest him. No one shot back.

Action always beats reaction, Lyon said, but Daniel Koltun began shooting before her officers had time to do either. It was an airsoft gun; the bullets were plastic and nonlethal. A SARPD officer standing close enough to Koltun said he heard the sound of the gun's CO2 cartridges and radioed immediately to let the other officers know: The gun wasn't real.

"Had he not been close enough to hear it, the outcome may have been very different," Lyon said. "This situation could have absolutely gone either direction and ended in an officer-involved shooting."

In December, Pennsylvania State Police shot and killed 19-year-old Christian Hall, following a standoff in which he held a realistic-looking pellet gun. It's one of at least 248 fatal officer-involved shootings since 2015 in which the decedent was in possession of a pellet gun, toy weapon or replica gun, according to a Washington Post database of police shootings in the U.S.

Fake guns are a topic of discussion in SARPD's use-of-force training, but there's no required course on the subject. There's no singular way to assess a gun's authenticity that would guarantee a safe outcome for police and the public, Lyon said.

People sometimes remove or cover up the orange tip on an airsoft gun to make it seem real, she said. Others paint an orange tip onto the barrel of a real firearm to make it look like a toy or fake gun.

Unless an officer has the luxury of holding the firearm to analyze it, there's no way to know whether it's real or fake, Lyon said. Trying to discern between the two puts officers at risk of being shot if their response time is delayed.

Shooting in the Poconos raises question: Should police fire at moving cars?

Lyon said SARPD officer Brandon Bingler knew Koltun's weapon was an airsoft gun as soon as he heard it fire. The incident that began as a summary offense when Koltun, 42, tried soliciting rides from a street corner in East Stroudsburg, escalated quickly once Koltun became belligerent and uncooperative, Lyon said.

Police followed him from the street corner to a crowded Walmart parking lot, "severely decreasing the time officers had to continue to deescalate the situation," she said. An officer moved Koltun's possessions then, a hand truck and generator he had set down in the parking lot, and Koltun pulled the gun from his waistband and began shooting.

When someone displays a firearm, SARPD officers are trained to consider the totality of the circumstances, Lyon said; not just the presence of the gun. That includes the bystanders in the parking lot, and the surrounding cars off of which stray bullets could ricochet.

"Thank God for all involved" that the gun wasn't real, Lyon said — that her officer knew the difference, and that they didn't return fire. Officers eventually arrested Koltun, who they say remained uncooperative and violent, with the help of a police dog named Bendix.

No officer wants to kill someone, Lyon said. When encounters like these do turn fatal, learning afterword that the decedent's gun was fake only magnifies the grief an officer and victim's family feels, the police chief said.

"Talking about these issues in never easy," she said. "Not from a law enforcement perspective, and not for the families and friends of persons killed by the police. We need to have these conversations anyway."

Officer-involved shootings are under increasing public scrutiny, the police chief said — she knows that. Lyon said she's hopeful that transparent conversation about incidents like Wednesday's can promote mutual understanding between police and the public.

Can you tell which of the three guns in the image accompanying this article is real? If you chose the one in the middle, you're right.

Hannah Phillips is the public safety reporter at Pocono Record. Reach her at hphillips@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Pocono Record: Stroud Area Regional Police on why they didn't shoot back