GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) — Green Bay police say they recovered a facsimile handgun from a teen who flashed it multiple times as officers were clearing the downtown area after the Fourth of July fireworks.
“[Officers] were dealing with a group of juveniles who were actually out after curfew, trying just to get them to leave downtown and go home,” said Police Chief Chris Davis. “[The teen] was not being super cooperative and then starts to walk away. He then turns around and he lifts his shirt, and [we see] what appears to be the handle of a hand gun.”
Police say it happened just before 11 p.m. Monday when they saw a 16-year-old boy pull up his sweatshirt twice to reveal a black handgun in his waistband.
“Now, the officers are confronted with a situation where it looks like you have somebody with a handgun in a crowd of people. So they go to try to take him into custody, he ran from the officers and was caught about a half a block away,” Davis told WTAQ News. “Normally there’s a reason why somebody displays a firearm. It puts officers in a really difficult position because that’s a potentially lethal threat to people in the area.”
The teen told police that the gun was not real and his friends told him to flash the gun at officers.
But in the dark, from a distance, on a busy night downtown – it’s not easy to discern whether it was a real gun on not.
“You really can’t [tell]! I watch that video, and it looks to me like somebody with a hand gun. What’s especially concerning is that he’s lifting up his shirt and showing that to people who are obviously the police in a marked car and in uniforms,” Davis said. “This is an example of the really difficult job that our officers have in trying to keep the community safe, and in this case, at a large community event…You have to make a split-second decision when you’re confronted with this. We didn’t know until after this was all over that it wasn’t a real gun.”
The orange part of the facsimile firearm had apparently been painted over with black paint as well.
With the perpetrators in this case, like many in recent weeks, being juveniles – Davis has a message for parents.
“Know where your kids are. Know what they’re doing. If they have something like this for some reason, and if that’s okay with you, make sure it doesn’t leave the house,” Davis said. “There’s absolutely no reason for it to be out in public. There is just nothing good that is going to come from having a realistic-looking, fake gun in public.”
Watch body camera footage of the incident here:
Davis says following the events in Highland Park, Illinois fresh in everyone’s mind from earlier that day, it obviously raised a lot of concern.
“Of course it did! Yes. Issues like that at community events, generally, that we’ve seen over the last few years with increasing frequency [raise concern],” Davis said. “It’s bad enough to come across something like that in day-to-day interaction with people. But in a big public event like that? I’m sure that’s the first thing that comes to [officers] minds. It certainly is for me.”
Police say this incident highlights many other incidents in which people are utilizing fake, facsimile, splatter guns, and other items to intimidate, or instill fear into people by making them believe they have a real firearm. This concerns police about the risk tragedy resulting from the use of these realistic facsimile guns.
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