So, let me get this straight: A bunch of white dudes just gunned down an unarmed black woman they suspected was attempting to trespass in a gated community and the Attorney General isn't calling for an investigation into racial profiling?
I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you.
(This post riffs pretty heavily off ToddG's here.)
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38 comments:
Not trying to be a downer but just read this that was linked to WRSA.
I don't frequently agree with the anarchists 100% but do on that post.
I love the double standard of all the people who carry guns and would definitely shoot someone trying to run them down with a car chiding people who carry guns for shooting someone who tried to run them down with a car.
(I agree with Zerogov on a lot of stuff, but the prose gets teriffically purple at times in the quest for ideological purity. I mean, a fireman getting a cat out of a tree becomes a "jackbooted thug of the state trampling the kittens tree-climbing freedoms and carrying it to off to its comfortable catnip gulag.")
Well in the police officers defense the car trunk and hood are thingies that go up. That would make it an assault vehicle according to the senator from California
Gerry
"That would make it an assault vehicle according to the senator from California"
The fact that it was used to assault the uniformed USSS guard at the WH gate makes in one de facto as well as de jure. ;)
Well, if the facts she had no gun and got out of the car hold true it does make sense to ask "have they no Tazers".
I think ZG is suggesting the state put more effort into arming up rather than less leathal stuff like more effective vehicle barriers.
Of course the responsibility for the woman's death rests with her ultimately.
Did she get her skittles and tea?
The video of the USSS uniformed officer looks like he was taken out by the his own guys raising the protective barrier.
Gerry
Heh.
Honestly, I think it's a very sad story from several angles. Maybe the cheese slid off her cracker, or maybe she was a confused and frightened tourist. Either way, she's dead and her kid has no mom.
Were they right to shoot her? I am not qualified to answer that. I wasn't there. And I seriously doubt we will ever know the answers here.
Scott J,
If somebody tries to run me over, I am not going to taze them.
Normally it's the hairsprayed bimbo at the TV news desk who asks "Why didn't they just shoot the tires out?", so I always get a bit of cognitive dissonance to see it from the rough-and-tough gun-toting crowd.
The car that was chased does not show evidence of having rammed a barricade, bumped maybe.
The cop car was taken out by a rising barricade.
The injured officer was in that car.
The only shots fired where by the police.
This is starting to look like a tragic mistake. It could have been defused if some one would have been a little less amped up.
Paul,
That is not the USSS officer to which I am referring:
"When she was stopped by a larger barricade, she reversed and struck a Secret Service officer, who flipped over the hood, said witness B.J. Campbell, a tourist."
"If somebody tries to run me over, I am not going to taze them"
Not while they're in the car, of course not.
But if you're a police officer rather than private citizen and allegedly "protect and serve" is supposed to trump "go home at the end of your shift" you perhaps have other options available to you.
Most all street officers around here are issued Tazers (the kind that shoot out darts on wires so they work at more than contact distance). The departments all made a BIG deal out of having this less lethal option too.
Of course we're all just armchair quarterbacking with fuzzy facts at this point.
No need to make a circular firing squad out of it.
That lady reminded me of Michelle Obama...
Scott J,
"Most all street officers around here are issued Tazers (the kind that shoot out darts on wires so they work at more than contact distance)."
1) Tazers all shoot darts. If it doesn't shoot darts it's not a Tazer.
2) Less-lethal options exist for when an officer needs to gain compliance or take a suspect into custody. There is no requirement to respond to an incident that has already escalated to the level of lethal force (ie people getting run down with cars) by escalating gradually up some "use of force continuum". The police officer has the same right to respond to a deadly assault with lethal force as any other citizen, and our side would do well to remember that lest our words come back to haunt us in a self-defense case some day.
"Well, Mr. J, why didn't you think to equip yourself with a Tazer? In a statement you made on October 4th of last year, you said, and I quote..."
Scott J,
"No need to make a circular firing squad out of it."
Yeah, sorry. :o
Less-lethal options are a hot-button issue with me, as they sometimes contribute to a misunderstanding of the force continuum. Unlike baseball, you can run from first straight to third, or home from second. ;)
Assaulting someone with a car is generally recognized as justifying the use of deadly force.
Running around secure areas when uninvited may justify deadly force.
I do feel bad for her family but I do not blame the officers for their response.
Gerry
I think the officers' actions here were perfectly justified, and based on video I've seen of the incident they were remarkably restrained.
I'm not saying that is what happened here, but a thought exercise:
Woman tries to run you down. Lethal force authorized.
Woman steps out of car, and unless a weapon is visible, is lethal force still authorized? I would say no, that the situation has deescalated.
In this case, exiting the car is the equivalent of dropping a gun: the attacker has disarmed herself, and shooting her would be no different from shooting a person who has dropped his gun and surrendered.
To use Tam's baseball analogy, unlike baseball, you do not have to run the bases in order. You can go from third back to first.
"Woman steps out of car, and unless a weapon is visible, is lethal force still authorized?"
Unless she got out of that car slowly and with her hands clearly visible? You betcha.
Let's look at it this way: Somebody runs down your (wife/mom/sister/coworker/whatever) and then careens right at you in their automobile, even though your gun is drawn and pointed at them, and then jumps out of the car at you. What do you do? *BAM!* Oops! She was unarmed.
What's every Monday Morning Peyton Manning gonna say then?
@ Gerry 10:56,
Point of order: The "shoulder thing that goes up" comment was originally uttered by neither a Senator nor someone from California.
Please do not ever make me defend one of those hags again. :)
Thank you,
Drifter
"Yeah, sorry. :o"
No harm, no foul.
And since I stepped away for a "lunch hour" at the range (2 more m4gery break in rounds, 6 to go. And a dead battery in the chrono so I couldn't velocity check some rounds in a different rifle. I left the spare battery at home :( ) you and DiveMedic covered one of the points I had in mind.
Another (and perhaps this comes from reading too much content at WRSA) is do they really have the same leathal force rights as us. They after all have thousands of taxpayer training dollars poured into them that's supposed to make them better at moving around those continuum bases than us mere mundanes. Not to mention the overuse of SWAT turning so many encounters that should be simple into lethal ones.
Lastly, sorry I was using Tazer as a blanket term like Xerox.
I don't carry one because all I have seen are big and bulky. Plus all the ones that don't shoot darts make me think I'll wind up like Sam's roommate in Transformers 2 :)
Wow. You are just a goddess of snark. I am in awe.
I don't like Monday Morning Quarterbacking these events, but the one thing about this whole thing that I saw from the video shown on various stations last night was an officer firing at the vehicle as IT DROVE AWAY.
In Indiana, except for extremely exceptional circumstances, officers are NOT justified in shooting at a fleeing felon.
This ruling I believe is the result of a Indiana Supreme court case and is the standard mantra for certified police firearms instructors or it was up till 4 years ago when I last went through a re-cert at Plainfield. violations can lead to criminal prosecution it all depends upn the circumstances and the local prosecutor...
All The Best,
Frank W. James
And I must admit I'm qb'ing based on what I've read here and heard in radio reports. Haven't watched any video.
Drifter,
I stand corrected and IOU a glass of adult beverage if we ever shall meet.
Defending hags is dirty work.
Gerry
Based on the location of the incident I wonder if "Car Bomb" was going through anyone's mind at the time of the shooting?
Just wondering...
Earl Harding
"On the bright side, everybody knows those things'll stop heck out of a car now. "
Near the tail end of that video, you can see a gap in the row of pop-up barriers where his unit went through. This is not a good sign. They should have been stronger at partial deployment than at full erection. I'm thinking a re-design is needed. As is, you would just need a blocker vehicle to create a gap for the following vbied. Someone screwed up in procurement.
Will,
Watching the video myself, it looked like barriers were lowered individually for emergency response vehicles to get through. I'll need to go back and look at it again.
Word on the street is that the cop-wannabe that murdered her was a White Hispanic.
In this particular situation one must wonder if the words "car bomb" was running across the internal vision of everyone of these officers like a marquee.
I wasn't there. I'm not trying to acqb this. But I do wonder why an armed man in body armor can't wait to at least see a gun before shooting people.not just in this case. Seems to happen too often for my liking.
Tam,
looked to me that they can control each half of the street separately. They dropped the outgoing side for access, but there is a gap in the middle of the inbound side, which is where the unit was driving. It's possible they can't drop the inbound side at all, due to the damaged section(s). Can't tell if it is hydraulic, pneumatic, or electrical powered. Fast acting, though! I'm thinking fluid type, that lost the interconnection due to damage, hence the apparent lack of movement afterwards.
They should have known she wasn't armed with a gun in the first place b/c it's illegal to carry in D.C., duh!
Question only
Is there not a difference between a situation such as this where
"somebody runs down your (wife/mom/sister/coworker/whatever) and then careens right at you in their automobile, even though your gun is drawn and pointed at them, and then jumps out of the car at you"
where 'you' must respond, and 'you and 10, 15, 20 colleagues' must respond?
Even here in the PRUK I can act to defend myself if attacked and yet should I be there with 10 colleagues how I respond will be judged considerably more critically. Rightly so?
One of the officer survival topics I always covered with recruits I trained was that a motor vehicle was also a weapon. I’ve personally handled all of the supervisory duties involved with an officer involved shooting involving the use of a vehicle vs. LEO. It gets really hectic in proximity to a car coming at you or clipping another LEO. At this point means of stopping the vehicle are pretty much out the door. I’d love to review the investigation results on the D.C. incident and am curious as to which agency will investigate it.
To the folks criticizing the use of deadly force, are you out of your ever-loving skulls?
Carey had already directly injured one person with her vehicle in an attempt to evade capture. She was still behind the wheel of that deadly weapon -- a weapon she'd demonstrated a willingness to use -- when she was shot.
You don't taze active shooters. You don't taze suicide bombers. And you don't taze people on the other side of a windshield... that one should be pretty obvious.
Here's a simple rule to understand in America: If you try to kill a cop while surrounded by other cops, you're probably going to die and the courts are going to give a nice easy thumbs up to the whole thing.
I think I'm going to start referring to the use of Lethal/Less-Lethal Force using what I propose be forever more known as Tam's Baseball Analogy.
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