Officer John Lee, who fatally shot an unarmed man Feb. 4 while trying to arrest him, was indefinitely suspended because he “placed himself in a vulnerable position where he didn’t give himself time to react,” Police Chief William McManus said Thursday.

But Lee still could get his job back, McManus told the San Antonio Express-News Editorial Board.

McManus expressed frustration Thursday at finding himself under pressure from two directions — acknowledging that his rank and file officers want to know if he “has their backs” while facing the need to explain his department’s actions to a community that has seen three officer-involved shootings in two years.

The chief has said Lee fired his service weapon at Antronie Scott, 36, outside Scott’s apartment complex on the North Side because Scott quickly spun around and the officer feared for his life. Lee thought Scott had a weapon, which turned out to be a cellphone, police have said.

Marquise Jones, 23, was shot by an off-duty SAPD officer in 2014 and Gilbert Flores, 41, was shot to death by a sheriff’s deputy in 2015. Scott’s killing has accelerated a series of rallies and town hall meetings to discuss all three shootings, which also came in an era of high-profile police shootings across the nation.

McManus, joined by City Manager Sheryl Sculley and Deputy City Manager Erik Walsh, told the editorial board he was angry that “this thing that we read about that is happening in other cities has happened here.”

He said he was trying to implement changes through training and within the police culture, rather than just punitively.

Adopting a catch phrase that has become current among law enforcers nationwide, McManus said these “lawful but awful” shootings must end — but said the way Lee approached Scott’s car was an all-too-common mistake, an “issue that happens all the time, not just here, but everywhere.”

Sculley went a step further.

“Where was the supervision? Who was overseeing (the officer), how were they coaching the officer?” she said. “It isn’t just about the officer.”

The Repeat Offenders Program detectives who had been following Scott and called in Lee to make the arrest were in charge of the operation and they also could face suspensions of up to 20 days, the chief said.

Lee was placed on a “contemplative indefinite suspension” Tuesday, and has seven days to notify the chief’s office that he wants a hearing.

Lee, an 11-year veteran of SAPD, “will meet with the chief sometime next week,” Sgt. Jesse Salame, an SAPD spokesman, said Thursday. “At that time, the suspension can be upheld or amended.”

If McManus upholds Lee’s indefinite suspension, then the officer has the right to appeal his termination to an arbitrator, Salame said.

The chief said he has been meeting one-on-one with officers to discuss the Scott shooting and said many of them question whether he would defend them in similar situations.

“I tell them, if I can defend you, I will defend you, no matter what,” McManus said. “I will defend you if you’re right, if you are right or if you just made an honest, good faith error in judgment, I will defend you.”

He said the Scott shooting was “an honest, good faith error, a big error in judgment.”

Citing a 1989 Supreme Court ruling in the Graham vs. Connor case, McManus said police use of force must be “objectively reasonable, that an officer’s actions were reasonable in light of the facts and circumstances confronting him.”

But that standard “does not fit with the community’s expectation of the standard they’d like to see,” McManus added. “You explain to someone (that) the officer thought they had a weapon, nobody’s buying that. Nobody cares, especially when it’s their family member, their friend, but that's what the legal standard is.”

“You can’t expect a police officer to stand there in a dangerous situation where he or she believes someone is armed and they are a danger and not do anything. That’s the standard set” by the court, he said.

Last month, McManus joined more than 200 leaders from police departments across the country at a meeting with the U.S. Justice Department and the Police Executive Research Forum, in Washington to discuss police reform efforts. PERF leaders have called civilian-police confrontations the issue of the decade for U.S. law enforcement.

McManus said training must catch up with the realities that officers face each day.

“Officers are wanting to do the right thing, make an arrest, and they often put themselves in danger doing so,” he said. “That’s why training needs to change. … When you get out there and you’re dealing with a fluid situation like this, get that tunnel vision, hearing goes, it is a psychological nightmare when that happens.”

ezavala@express-news.net

Twitter: @elizabeth2863