Oakland Cops Begged Him to Drop the Spears and He Charged Anyway

Oakland let homeless encampments spread across the city for years while promising compassion over consequences.

Two officers walked into one of those camps and found a man swinging homemade spears in their faces.

What happened next explains exactly why Oakland's soft policies keep ending with police pulling the trigger.

Bodycam Shows Officers Begging Him to Drop the Spears

Jose Angel Castillo was standing at a homeless encampment on 40th Avenue when California Highway Patrol officers first spotted him.

He was holding a hammer and two homemade spears – knives lashed to the end of metal poles.

He dropped the hammer when ordered.

He kept the spears.

Bodycam audio released this week captures officers pleading with him for minutes straight.

Officers can be heard ordering him again and again to drop the knives, as Castillo slings the weapons over his shoulder and moves down an embankment toward the highway.

Castillo's response was not confusion.

It was defiance.

"No! No! Leave me alone!" he shouted back, according to the footage.

Oakland police say he then lunged at officers with a weapon.

Officers fired.

Castillo died at the scene.

A Civil Rights Attorney Second-Guessed the Officers Who Stopped Him

Within days, civil rights attorney Jim Chanin was already picking apart the shooting for local reporters.

He wouldn't say the shooting was justified.

He wanted a debate about how much threat a man swinging spears at police actually poses.

That is the same reflex that shows up every time California police protect themselves or the public, in a city that treated encampments as untouchable for years.

The shooting hadn't even made the news for a week before the second-guessing started.

Oakland's homeless population hit 5,485 people by the last count, spread across roughly 1,700 camps citywide.

The city council only tightened its encampment rules this spring, after years of letting tent cities grow along sidewalks, freeways and business corridors.

Councilmember Ken Houston said it plainly before the vote: the old approach "did not work."

He was right, and Castillo is the proof.

A city that lets armed, unstable men live undisturbed in public space for years does not get to act shocked when officers finally have to confront one.

Two Oakland officers had only seconds to decide whether a man swinging spears was going to hurt someone.

A lawyer with a law degree and zero seconds of that pressure got to sit back and second-guess them on the evening news.

This is not the first time California cops have faced this exact call.

Sacramento prosecutors reviewed the 2016 shooting of Joseph Mann, a knife-wielding man high on methamphetamine who rushed toward civilians and ignored commands, and cleared the officers who fired.

The district attorney's own report said officers were permitted to use deadly force once Mann's conduct put bystanders at risk.

That shooting also drew a civil rights attorney who compared the officers to big-game hunters.

The pattern holds nearly a decade later.

An armed man ignores commands.

Officers open fire to protect the public.

Activists show up afterward to relitigate a call that had to be made in seconds, from the safety of a courtroom or a cable news segment.

Nobody trains for that job by reading press releases from an encampment sofa.

What the Law Actually Says About Split-Second Decisions

Federal courts do not judge these shootings with the benefit of hindsight, and they should not.

The Supreme Court's Graham v. Connor standard asks whether the threat was immediate at the moment force was used, not whether a lawyer watching slow-motion video days later can imagine a gentler outcome.

Courts have granted officers protection in strikingly similar cases – suspects who ignored commands, kept weapons in hand and moved toward officers or bystanders before shots were fired.

Mere possession of a weapon is not enough to justify force under that standard.

Refusing to drop it, waving it, and closing distance on armed officers is.

Castillo did all three, on camera, for minutes, while officers gave him chance after chance to stop.

Legal analysts who track these rulings note that courts ask a simple question: did officers have time to recognize a suspect no longer posed a threat before force was used.

Here, the video shows the opposite was true.

That is not a case prosecutors struggle with.

That is the easiest call in use-of-force law.

Oakland's Own Policies Built This Moment

None of this happens without years of officials treating encampments as a permanent fixture instead of a problem to solve.

Oakland's own homelessness plan admits the city will need over a billion dollars in new spending just to cut the unsheltered population in half within five years.

That is the price tag for a decade of "housing first" and "harm reduction" that let camps multiply instead of clearing them.

Every month those camps stood untouched, more unstable and armed people had the run of Oakland's streets.

Two CHP officers and two Oakland cops paid the price for that policy failure on a July afternoon, forced to make a split-second call that a city council refused to make for years.

They made the right one.

Oakland is only now facing up to the fact that its encampment strategy failed.

The city just doesn't want to own what that failure cost the officers who had to clean up the mess.

Sources:

• Stepheny Price, "Terrifying moment spear-wielding man lunges at California cops before shots ring out," Fox News, August 13, 2026.
• "Oakland Police Release Body Camera Video of Fatal Shooting of Man Armed With Pole-Mounted Knives," Officer.com, August 13, 2026.
• "Sacramento Officers Cleared in Shooting of Homeless Man," Courthouse News Service, January 27, 2017.
• Ken Wallentine, "Qualified Immunity in Use-of-Force Cases, Part I," PORAC, January 24, 2026.
• "Oakland council approves new policy making it easier to clear homeless encampment," Local News Matters, April 17, 2026.
• "Oakland is beautiful, but encampments – and the city's inequitable response – are holding it back," The Oakland Report, May 27, 2026.