Negligent Discharge

So one of the NYPD cops, an ESU* officer at that, cranked off a round in the Columbia building that was temporarily occupied by student protestors. He was using the weapon-mounted light to find a way to navigate barriers in the dark. Fortunately the bullet didn't hit anyone.

There was absolutely no reason to have an unholstered firearm in the middle of that Punch & Judy Show. That was a job for a handheld light, not the SureFire U-Boat screwed to your Glock. 

People act like just having a light on a pistol turns it into some sort of dual-purpose tool and next thing you know they're using it to direct traffic or look for stuff they dropped under their squad car in the dark. I swear to gawd, it's only a matter of time before we hear about some Officer Fife using it to check for horizontal gaze nystagmus.

*NYPD Emergency Services Unit contains their equivalent of SWAT, but not all ESU officers are SWAT dudes.

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Jihadi or Joker?

An interesting long-form piece on how the FBI and NYPD investigate... and maybe groom ...terrorism suspects.

In this case we have a former USMC reserve NCO who got into Boogaloo groups online and converted to Islam and then, well, read the piece for yourself...

Fong focused his energies on a new meme-oriented Instagram page about Islam, which eventually birthed a new chat group on Signal. Fong, the administrator of this new group, called it “Mujahideen in America.” He wanted the group’s discussions to involve Islam, guns, and training.

“We’re going to go over here to talk about self-defense,” Fong, who went by the username asian_ghazi, said, describing what he viewed as topics for the group chat. “Boogaloo stuff, like kind of guerrilla tactics, but mostly for hypothetical scenarios, mostly self-defense, weapons safety, firearms.”

Fong had curated the group’s membership. There was Daniel, a Russian speaker Fong first met in the WhatsApp group that had fractured. There was also James, a teenager and recent convert to Islam who shared Fong’s ironic sense of humor. James had brought someone named Moussa into the group.

Moussa, pushy and boisterous, started to bring up terrorist groups in the chat. Daniel joined in, giving his opinions about Islamist movements in Chechnya and other parts of Russia.

“Their talks about this kind of stuff would be here and there,” Fong said.

Fong didn’t know what to do. Should he kick these guys out? He’d already seen one internet group fall apart. But he struggled to tell if this discussion went beyond harmless intellectual curiosity and debate.

Daniel and Moussa weren’t who they claimed to be. Daniel was working undercover for the NYPD. Moussa was an FBI informant, known in the bureau’s parlance as a “confidential human source.” They’d been tasked to find and secretly investigate potential terrorists online.

When does shitposting cross the line from First Amendment protected bantz and become Providing Material Aid to Terrorists?
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Screwing Up By The Numbers

This Tactical Tangents podcast is an excellent breakdown of the colossal multilevel failure that surrounded the killing of Breonna Taylor (for which nobody has yet been held adequately accountable, in my opinion.)

"In the world of ugly warrant execution, there are a lot of bad scenarios that have happened with lessons to be learned for people on both sides of the door. In this episode, Mike & Jim break down a notorious recent incident: The 2020 shooting of Breonna Taylor during a narcotics warrant service in Louisville, Kentucky.

While it’s about the Breonna Taylor incident, we’re focusing on the tactical issues surrounding the actual warrant service that night, not the plethora of issues that led to it. Risk is always involved in serving a warrant, so how can it best be mitigated for all involved? Remember that having a warrant doesn’t make you any smarter or tactically proficient. The court just gave you permission; the skill department is all on you."

Never Get Out of the Boat

What Claude Werner would call a "negative outcome" occurred recently in the southwestern New Jersey town of Mantua.

The homeowner saw a couple of dudes rummaging around in his shed and his pickup truck, and one of them had a gun. He went outside to try and scare them off by, of all things, lobbing firecrackers at them. Then he went back in the house, retrieved what he told the 911 operator was a ".45" his grandfather had left him, and inexplicably went back outside to await the officer's arrival with sadly predictable results.

"In a five-minute call with two law enforcement officials on Sept. 14, 2021, Mr. Sharp told officers that he had spotted two men from his window at about 1 a.m. One was in his shed, holding a silver gun. The other was trying to get inside his truck.

He explained that he had thrown firecrackers toward the men to try to scare them away, but that had not worked. And he said that he owned a gun, passed down to him by his grandfather.

“I don’t know what I’m allowed to do with it,” he said in the recorded call. “So I threw a couple quarter sticks at them. Maybe that’s not the professional thing to do, but — ”

Then a burst of gunfire can be heard on the 911 recording."

That's right. The officer, amped up and primed to find a man with a gun in his hand, did in fact arrive and find a man with a gun in his hand.

He unassed his squad car and, without issuing a challenge or anything, shot Mr. Sharp dead right there in his yard.

Adding insult to fatal injury, the ".45" Mr. Sharp was holding was apparently a "detailed replica".

The officer is being criminally charged in the shooting, but that doesn't help poor, dead, Mr. Sharp any.

I know I've said this before, but:

Once the cops have been called, you don't need to be running around outside with a gun in your hand. The chances for a blue-on-blue shooting skyrocket in incidences like that. Plainclothes officers get shot all the damn time in similar circumstances. It's easy to tell who the responding officers are because they show up in a car with blinking lights and they're all dressed the same. You want to not be on the playing field wearing the other team's uniform when they show up.

And for heaven's sake, don't try to bluff or scare someone with a toy gun. You might put them in reasonable fear for their life.

Could you tell these were toys? From thirty feet away? In the dark?

QotD: Contempt of Cop Edition...

From Bobbi's latest...

Nobody has a beating coming from the police -- not the most innocent of drivers pulled over on vague suspicion or the worst violent offender caught bloody-handed. Nobody should ever fear getting kicked by an arresting officer while his peers hold them down. The police are not a street gang and shouldn't get away with acting like one. In Memphis, they haven't.

Go and RTWT.

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Straw men... and women.

Kevin D. Williamson's latest at The Dispatch is, alas, paywalled. It's absolutely spot on, though.

"Prosecutors at all levels—from local yokels up to the feds—are notoriously loath to prosecute ordinary straw-buyer cases. If there’s a big, juicy, organized-crime case to be made against gun traffickers, that’s another story: For example, the feds were very happy to bust up an Illinois-based gun-trafficking ring involving U.S. military personnel who were acting as full-time straw buyers for Chicago’s infamous Gangster Disciplines, an old-school crime syndicate that has been operating in Illinois since the 1960s. And they should be busting those guys.

But most straw-buyer cases don’t look like that. Most straw buyers are girlfriends or family members of convicted criminals and other prohibited persons, and most straw purchases involve one firearm. (Or so seems to be the consensus; again, real data are difficult to find.) Straw buyers who get charged with the crime are, by definition, almost always first-time offenders, and many of them are sympathetic subjects: Did we really expect that 23-year-old mother of three to tell the felon who is the father of her children and upon whom she is financially dependent to go jump in Lake Michigan when he ordered her to go buy him a pistol? We do not instinctively want to put such offenders in prison—but that is who a great many straw buyers are.

(Similarly, try putting yourself in the place of a firearms retailer, a businessman who already has a target on his back, politically speaking—in the age of “woke” moral panic, how assertive are you going to be about somebody you suspect of being a straw buyer? Short of her preemptively confessing to the crime, are you going to tell a young black woman shopping for a 9mm semiautomatic with her boyfriend that you think she is not a prospective customer but a prospective criminal? This is your family’s livelihood, and the same people who want to put you out of business for selling guns at all will be happy to try to put you out of business on grounds of racial discrimination, however vaguely attested to. I have spoken to firearms dealers who have gone forward with sales they believed to be straw purchases precisely for that reason.)"

In all my years of working in the retail firearms biz, I'm only aware of the feds going after one straw buyer, and it was because guns he'd purchased here in the U.S. turned up in cartel hands after he'd traded them for dope. Come to think of it, he was the only big-time straw buyer I was ever aware of, and we just thought he was a guy with a good-paying job and a taste for oddball tacticool-looking guns like SPAS-12s and such.

I've turned down plenty of purchases that my spider sense told me were straw purchases, a lot of them really obvious ones and some that were more subtle. But I can see why some folks would be leery of doing so in this day and age, for exactly the reason Kevin highlighted.

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Sowing and Reaping

Greg Ellifritz has a post up reflecting on yesterday's bombshell revelations about the police (non)response to the Uvalde school shooter and its multiple points of abject failure:

Which option would you choose given this scenario? I would argue that sometimes you have to take the shot regardless of the backstop. If these officers would have missed, they may have hit a couple kids on the playground. That would be absolutely horrible, but would be a far better result than the massacre that occurred.

But again, these officers will not be disciplined for allowing a murderer to get into an elementary school. They would be fired and sued if they had missed and shot kids on a playground. These are the rules society has set for officers. There’s no expectation that they do anything. They get punished if they screw up. They aren’t given the training to be truly competent with their weapons. It’s easy to see why they made the choices they did.

You should definitely RTWT.

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Soup Sandwich

Gorillafritz has a post up with his take on the failtastic police response in Uvalde. While some of what he wrote has been outdated by new information (it turns out that the door through which the killer entered was no longer propped open, for instance) the core elements are still true.

I trained a lot of police agencies in my career. It was rare to see a chief in any of the classes the departments scheduled with me unless the training was a state-mandated requirement. I once had a police chief tell me that he would no longer be coming to my department firearms training classes because “guns are loud and dirty.”

Who watches the watchers?

This is pretty squicky.

Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist's plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News.

Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.

Then again, given the sordid history at some agencies, it isn't entirely shocking.

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You have got to be kidding me.

Look, just because you have the right to keep and bear arms doesn't mean you have to exercise that right.

For instance, if your self control is so poor that you go running down the street in your underwear, chasing down a car full of teen and preteen girls, literal church youth group members, and drag their adult chaperone out of the car by her hair and hold a gun to her head... well, maybe firearms ownership isn't a good fit for you, dude.

Multiple girls inside the car reported hearing the sheriff ask the woman who she was and say "I will f----shoot you," according to investigators.

The youth group leader, who grew up in the house next to Rowland and considered him a family friend, said she told Rowland her name and that she was his neighbor, but added that the words did not seem to register.

"That's when I really got scared because the gun was still at my head and he didn‘t know who was," she said, according to the affidavit.

And you certainly have no damn business being the sheriff of anything.

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"Tough" on "Crime"

When politicians campaign on being tough on crime, it's important to research how they define the terms "tough" and "crime".

Civil asset forfeiture is the type specimen of Incentiva Perversio, the Common North American Perverse Incentive. https://t.co/Kep5yplCCo

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) December 8, 2021

When Karens Attack...

So the story on the flight from Indianapolis with the bomb scare has come out, and it is dumber than you can possibly imagine.

American Airlines Flight 4817 from Indianapolis — operated by Republic Airways — made an emergency landing at LaGuardia just after 3 p.m., and authorities took a suspicious passenger into custody for several hours.

It turns out the would-be “bomber” was just a vintage camera aficionado and the woman who reported him made a mistake, sources said.

The woman was traveling with her husband and children, sitting across the aisle from her spouse, when she spotted another man in her hubby’s row scrolling through videos and photos of vintage cameras, sources said.

She thought he was looking up bomb-making instructions, and when the man pulled out his own camera and adjusted it she was convinced he was setting a timer on a detonator, sources said.

Get it? She saw some guy scrolling through videos of mechanical devices she did not understand, then he pulled a mechanical device she didn't understand out of his carry-on and started twiddling the dials, ergo, it must be a bomb. Clearly this woman is a graduate of Jack Bauer U.

Lady, the biggest danger on your flight for the past year hasn't been a guy with a bomb, it's been some drunk passenger throwing a toddler-grade shrieking shit fit over being asked to keep his germhole covered by a frazzled overworked stew and proceeding to try and exit the a/c via the emergency door at FL350.

Supposedly they evacuated the passengers via the emergency slides. If they got everybody down those slides onto the tarmac without anyone breaking an ankle, it's only because Embraer 175 cabins aren't but eight feet or so off the ground.

Granted, this isn't the most egregious example of "If you see something, say something, no matter if you're a panicky idiot or not," since that record is still held by the time a Cartoon Network guerrilla advertising gimmick shut down the entire city of Boston, but it's pretty spectacular.

The passenger who couldn't tell a shutter speed dial from a thermal detonator is not going to be charged with anything, since she was just doing her patriotic duty, and we don't want to discourage that, do we? Besides, panicky overreaction is not in the penal code.

Ce n'est pas une bombe

So the passenger got proned out on the tarmac in the way that normally makes conservatives yell "He should have just followed instructions!" and hauled off to the TSA offices where he got to explain cameras to the guardians of our nation's skies.

So the end of our flight got interesting pic.twitter.com/gdJSUUG906

— Laura (@lbrgdl) October 9, 2021

I hope the sky over La Guardia turns legal pad yellow and homie ends up owning someone when this is all over, but I'm not going to wager money on that outcome.

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Ahistorical Pearl Clutching

I would like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that this is not some new phenomenon and the police had machine guns before most of the military did. pic.twitter.com/b87yOSdQyx

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) September 10, 2021

Any idea where the tradition of police in the US wearing blue uniforms came from? You guessed it: Army surplus.

"Many cities like Los Angeles adopted the same practice of using Union Army surplus uniforms in the days following the Civil War. Similar photos of NYPD officers wearing the old uniforms and “Bobbie”-style helmets can be seen as early as 1893."

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What are you afraid of people seeing?

"Liberté, égalité, non photagraphie!" https://t.co/hkI15WYxC1

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 29, 2020

Oops.

Corporal Somebody-or-Other apparently never heard that it's rarely a career-enhancing move to do something that causes the governor have to start his day off by making apologetic phone calls to cable news CEOs. #cnnarrest https://t.co/Yo25wiRtwK

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 29, 2020

Really Bad Optics

Never pick a fight with a company that streams video by the terabyte.

At least one of the guys in that video is experiencing a potentially career-ending moment, while four are earning gold stars for their resumes.

Minnesota State Patrol needs to put their PIO's on danger pay, because all the walking back they're going to be doing in the near future is likely to cause repetitive stress injuries.

UPDATE: That was fast.

"Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz told CNN Worldwide President Jeff Zucker that he deeply apologizes for what happened and would work to have the crew released.

Jimenez and the others -- producer Bill Kirkos and photojournalist Leonel Mendez -- were taken to the city's downtown public safety building, but were released after 6 a.m. CT."

"So, how did you end up doing driver's license renewals in International Falls? Didn't you used to be on the Tac Team?"

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) May 29, 2020

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Zero Thought, Zero Logic...

The bobbies in some UK jurisdictions are getting way overzealous in their enforcement efforts...

Overnight 6 people have been summonsed for offences relating to the new corona virus legislation to protect the public:

These included;

Out for a drive due to boredom

Returning from parties

Multiple people from the same household going to the shops for non-essential items pic.twitter.com/FstjlfdEkD

— Warrington Police (@PoliceWarr) March 29, 2020

"In North Yorkshire, police published a photo showing a group of officers stopping a car. "This driver was making an essential journey, unfortunately others are not," they wrote."

Stop Checks at Catterick.
This driver was making an essential journey, unfortunately others are not. GOING FOR A 'RIDE OUT' IS NOT AN ESSENTIAL JOURNEY.@NYorksPolice @richmond_today @CatterickGSM @The_Black_Rats @1RegtRMP pic.twitter.com/zYCcBoHta4

— NYP Catterick Police (@NYPCatterickSNT) March 30, 2020

Did you catch that? Some dude is "out for a drive due to boredom" there in Warrington and the po-po disapprove.

Suppose I'm in living in Warrington (because, I don't know, I've taken complete leave of my senses and moved to England) and I decided to take the Mustang for a spin due to boredom.

Gratuitous Mustang picture to debug a Facebook image grab issue.

Assuming I remembered to drive on the wrong side of the road like they do over there, how many people would I come in contact with...within the magic six feet of... if I drove a twenty mile loop out from the house and back with no stops? Absolutely zero.

There would be zero chance of me picking up anyone else's germs, or giving anyone mine...unless I got pulled over by a platoonlet of snooping coppers who insisted on getting all up in my grille.
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Bad Commands

Craig Douglas with a very important public service announcement for the handgun toter...

View this post on Instagram

One of the worst places to be as a citizen, is held at gunpoint by multiple police officers who are issuing conflicting or poor commands. I observed this phenomenon quite a bit during my law enforcement career. A horrific example of this is the shooting of Daniel Shavers by Mesa, AZ. police officer Philip Brailsford in 2016. The footage below is from an Armed Movement in Structures (AMIS) class recently conducted in Albuquerque, NM and is an unscripted free flowing discussion between myself and the students, that is not part of the normal coursework. This is just a conversational sidebar in class but the topic of what the best course of action one should take when in this situation, is something that merits time and experimentation. Something I said or the way I said it may very well offend some police officers. As someone who spent over two decades as a full time police officer and retired honorably, I can say that if what I say upsets you, then do something about the problem. If you don’t, then you’re not part of the solution and the public will continue to view you with distrust. CD

A post shared by Craig Douglas (@southnarc) on Nov 18, 2019 at 1:08am PST

Warning Sign

So, about the glaring red flag in the recent Minneapolis police shooting...

No, not the fact that the cop was a Somali-American. Some people are all "zomg he was Somali and named Mohammed! Terr'ism!" Settle your ass down. If it were terrorism, he'd have shot the other cop and then all the responding cops until somebody shot him. It wasn't terrorism.

No, big red flag is that he was a grown man with a college degree and an apparently reasonably successful career in property management who decided, in his thirties, to drop it all to go be the police. There are two kinds of people who do that, and one is a disaster waiting to happen.

As one LEO put it on Facebook:

"I question the fuck out of people who have the ability to work a cush ass white collar job but instead make 38K starting pay to referee people's marriages."

Policing is generally something folks get into because they knew they always wanted to as a kid, or because it's a reasonably easy gig to land getting out of the military. It's the ones who suddenly decided in their thirties that they wanted to drop everything and be Batman and a Force For Good that worry me.
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Meanwhile, on Twitter...

Kim du Toit assured me that this would never happen. https://t.co/DOKGMZLflS

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 7, 2016

No word on whether FSP has successfully rewritten NH law to allow bail to be made in Bitcoin. https://t.co/ztVZxbkCr1

— Tamara K. (@TamSlick) November 7, 2016