Newly released body-worn camera footage of the Oct. 7 shooting of a 39-year-old Honolulu man reveals that while he was talking with Honolulu police standing in front of him, another three officers, hidden from view, rushed him from behind.
That’s when Tison Dinney quickly reacted, in an apparent attempt to defend himself, by picking up a pair of garden shears off the ground.
A second officer, with four years of service, immediately fired five shots, fatally injuring Dinney outside the Department of Health building on Punchbowl Street near the state Capitol. That was eight minutes after police arrived, the police chief said.
A third officer, whose body cam video was released, stood behind the second officer with his Taser drawn and deployed it at about the same time the gun was fired, Police Chief Susan Ballard said.
Dinney is the sixth person on Oahu to be killed by a police officer so far this year, and the incident was the 11th officer-involved shooting in 2018.
Ballard released the two videos Friday at a news conference and said there are others not yet reviewed, which will be released to the public later.
“No guns were drawn at the time,” she said.
Ballard said that the suspect swung the garden shears with one blade at the one officer. He was uninjured by the shears, protected by his vest, Ballard said.
Six police officers were called at 8:30 a.m. to the scene by the Sheriffs Division after Dinney allegedly threatened a man with a machete.
Police had been on the scene only eight minutes before they rushed Dinney. Deputy sheriffs had been talking to him for about 20 to 30 minutes prior to that, Ballard said.
Police found him near a large green electrical box behind the Health Department building, with a machete and a pair of garden shears lying on the ground near his feet.
Dinney was cornered in a narrow space between the utility box and a wall.
He is heard in the video asking officers, “Why you guys chasing me? What is the reason?”
A female officer, whose body-cam video was also released, is heard, saying, “We’re not chasing you. We’re not trying to trick you. We just like figure out everything that’s going on.”
She tries to coax him out, saying, “We step back. You come over here.”
Another officer is heard instructing her to “just keep him talking.”
She asks where he’s from and where he lives.
He responds saying, “I’m from Chuuk. I live Mayor Wright’s,” adding that he has lived in Hawaii for three years.
That’s when officers rushed him from behind to subdue him, and he picked up the garden shears.
The female officer audibly gasps.
Initially, a police official said the officers repeatedly told the man to move away from the weapons and that when they moved in to arrest him, he picked up the machete and swung at one officer, striking him in the torso.
Neither video shows Dinney swinging the garden shears, but the officer who rushed in and fired the shot almost instantaneously is in front of the officer with the Taser drawn.
Police initially reported deputy sheriffs responded to an argument between Dinney and another man, found him with a machete and shears, and used pepper spray on him to give up the weapons.
Dinney died of a gunshot wound to his torso.
HPD initially deployed body-worn cameras in August.
Ballard said the use of body cameras for the Waikiki District will start soon and that East Honolulu will be next. Officers in District 1, which includes downtown Honolulu, are fully equipped with body cams.
It is an “extremely difficult time whenever we have to take a life,” Ballard said, and it affects the officers, who do not have the luxury of watching the scene unfold in slow motion as viewers of the video do.
