An armed burglar was arrested after a tense standoff with police in Santa Rosa on Wednesday evening. The Santa Rosa Police Department responded to a burglary in progress in the 2500 block of Meda Avenue, where they encountered 23-year-old Jiovanny Rivas inside the property. According to the Santa Rosa Police Department, the homeowner had alerted the authorities after witnessing a man she did not recognize entering her home through a remote video system.
— Santa Rosa Police (@SantaRosaPolice) May 1, 2025
The situation escalated quickly when officers arrived around 8:35 PM and found Rivas pacing in the kitchen, refusing to exit the residence. When negotiations failed, the police were forced to retreat after Rivas armed himself with a large kitchen knife and barricaded himself inside a bedroom. The special response teams, including SWAT and Crisis Negotiators, could not convince Rivas to surrender peacefully throughout the 4-hour impasse.
In an attempt to resolve the standoff without a dangerous confrontation, officers used chemical agents, meant to gain voluntary compliance through the inducement of temporary discomfort, according to the SRPD. However, using these less-lethal tools only resulted in Rivas moving around the residence and retreating to barricade himself again. The police report details that even as a trained negotiator from the Hostage Negotiations Team tried to engage with Rivas, he would not respond.
With the knife eventually out of Rivas’s hands, the officers managed to subdue and arrest him after employing a combination of less-lethal projectiles and a taser. “They were effective and allowed officers to take Rivas into custody without any additional incident,” stated the Santa Rosa Police Department’s news release. Rivas sustained minor injuries from the force used, which included the deployment of a police canine, chemical agents, a taser, and less-lethal projectiles…