Katya Schwenk
Audio By Carbonatix
During the first seven months of the year, Phoenix police officers shot and killed four people — a number notable for how small it was. The year before, Phoenix cops had shot and killed 14 people, up from 12 the year before. Then suddenly, after four killings to start 2025, Phoenix police weapons went quiet.
They’re not so quiet anymore. After going exactly six months without a police shooting death, Phoenix officers have resumed fatally shooting people at an alarming rate. Since Aug. 19, a span of 41 days, Phoenix cops have shot and killed four people. Another two people were shot but survived their injuries.
It’s not clear whether the Phoenix Police Department’s six-month dry spell or its sudden spate of killings was the result of some policy change or a statistical quirk. Data on the department’s officer-involved shooting dashboard doesn’t appear to have been updated in months.
The uptick in police shootings does happen to coincide with the hiring of new Phoenix police Chief Matt Giordano, who joined the department on Aug. 11 and was officially sworn in on Aug. 28. Giordano did not return a request for comment from Phoenix New Times on the recent streak of shootings.
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The four fatal police shootings during this recent stretch occurred in a variety of circumstances.
Police killed 47-year-old Rocky Joe Ellis on Aug. 19 outside an IHOP after he allegedly bothered employees while armed with a hatchet, which he refused to drop when commanded by officers. Body-worn camera footage shows that officers shot Ellis with a less-lethal foam baton launcher before firing on him with a rifle. Video released to New Times as part of a records request also shows that officers waited six minutes to give Ellis medical aid after he was shot, leaving him motionless on the ground.
The death of Efrain Hidalgo on Aug. 31 drew scrutiny from the grassroots organization Poder In Action for a similar reason. Two officers stopped Hildalgo late at night for a bike light infraction in South Phoenix. Hidalgo fled and allegedly pulled a knife. A Phoenix cop shot him nine times without offering a warning to drop the knife, after which cops again waited a long period of time to render aid.
“Efrain should still be alive,” said Poder co-founder Ben Laughlin. “Bike riding at night is not a crime. Police should never be stopping people and escalating encounters like this, but especially not for supposed infractions that have no meaningful impact on public safety.”
On Sept. 8, Phoenix cops killed Ote-Tee Brooks Nalwood after they tracked his car down following an alleged armed robbery. Police surrounded Nalwood’s vehicle, firing on it when he allegedly raise a gun at them. Then, after a tense standoff that lasted 11 minutes, another offficer shot Nalwood when he again allegedly pointed a gun.
On Sept. 28, police shot and killed 52-year-old David Steinbach. According to a police advisory, Steinbach fired a gun in his apartment and pointed it at himself before holding up inside when police responded. For about six hours, police negotiated with the man until he came out of the apartment with a gun in his hand. Officers told him to drop it, police said, but he didn’t and police shot and killed him.
In addition to eight deaths this year, there have been four non-fatal shootings — two of which have happened in September. Police shot Wilson Melgar-Melgar on Sept. 24 after being told that he was holding a toddler hostage with a machete inside a house. Officers fired while he was still holding on to the child. A full briefing on that shooting is expected on Oct. 8. Police also shot a man, whom they have not yet named, on Sept. 2 after he allegedly fired at them from inside his apartment. Two officers were shot during the incident, and the unknown man was taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries.
The department’s data shows that officers shot 20 people in 2024 and 25 in 2023.
TJ L’Heureux
Rough start for police chief
After the third killing since Giordano took the reins at the department, Poder In Action was already laying the shootings at his feet.
“PPD has already been notorious for being the country’s deadliest police force. But the alarming start to Chief Giordano’s tenure has our full attention and our community is ready to fight back,” Isabel Garcia, the group’s co-director, said in a statement. Laughlin, the other co-director, said that Giordano “represents a backlash to police reform and a terrifying shift towards Trump’s brand of violent authoritarian law & order tactics.”
It might not be that simple. Changes in rank-and-file trigger-happiness don’t happen quite that fast after a leadership change. And at least publicly, Giordano has taken relatively moderate stances on police reform. During a public forum that was part of the hiring process, Giordano said he wanted the department to seek more feedback from people in their own communities and acknowledged — albeit vaguely — that the department should make efforts to reform itself.
It is true that the Phoenix Police Department has been particularly violent in recent years. Since 2013, Phoenix cops have killed at least 173 people, according to a report from the accident and injury firm Gammill Law. The study used data from Mapping Police Violence, a website that has become widely known as the foremost tracker of police killings that have happened in the United States since 2013. Only the Los Angeles Police Department has killed more people.
From 2018 to 2023, Phoenix police had one of the highest rates of fatal shootings among major cities across the country. During that time, there were 74 fatal shootings.
In June 2024, the Department of Justice completed a years-long investigation into the Phoenix Police Department and its history of unconstitutional policing. In a blistering 126-page final report, the DOJ found that from 2016 to 2022, Phoenix police regularly committed a number of civil rights violations, including using excessive and unnecessarily deadly force.
Those issues were in part caused by poor training, the DOJ noted, calling the tactics taught by the department “dangerous, unnecessary and unreasonable.” In training sessions observed by investigators, instructors directed officers to use force without warning or just seconds after arriving at a scene – sometimes “before even trying to speak to a person,” the report said, regardless of whether or not any threat was present. Investigators also found that the department was teaching officers that all force would lead to de-escalation.
Former chief Michael Sullivan was brought in to lead the department on an interim basis while the DOJ conducted its probe. Sullivan was in contention for the permanent gig but pulled himself from consideration earlier this year, leading the city to restart its search. That process ended with the hire of Giordano, a former Phoenix cop who had been serving as the executive director of the Arizona Peace Officer Standards and Training Board.
The DOJ report no longer looms over the department’s head, at least officially. After President Donald Trump took office earlier this year, his administration rescinded the report, ending the chance of federally enforced reforms. That decision was made to the glee of Phoenix’s officials — many of whom are Democrats —who insisted the police force could reform itself. Last year, Sullivan issued new use-of-force guidelines as part of that effort.
Still, Giordano has indicated that there are lessons to be learned from the report.
“The information in that report didn’t go away. What created that report didn’t go away,” Giordano said during his first press conference as chief. “We should always be looking to evolve.”
