Police shooting hits 4 bystanders, more details

[Norade]

Police are trained to shoot until the threat is stopped. However, the belief that it was unloading that caused the bystander injuries and not a ricochet, a miss, or over penetration is also flawed. An investigation is necessary to reveal these details. On another note I'm guessing that none of you have been in combat and I'd be willing to bet that none of you have dealt with the threat of being fired on...so maybe you should armchair quarter back something you do not understand.

However, I do agree. Better and more frequent training is needed. I've been calling for the government to raise the local taxes for a long time so this can be accomplished but until then many departments do not have the funding to provide ammunition let alone serious firearms training which can require hundreds of rounds per person. Now is this the fault of the department or the civilian government? Who knows.

If the police are lacking firearms training then they shouldn't be issued guns until they can have the proper training.

[SVPD]

Police are trained to shoot until the threat is stopped. However, the belief that it was unloading that caused the bystander injuries and not a ricochet, a miss, or over penetration is also flawed. An investigation is necessary to reveal these details. On another note I'm guessing that none of you have been in combat and I'd be willing to bet that none of you have dealt with the threat of being fired on...so maybe you should armchair quarter back something you do not understand.

However, I do agree. Better and more frequent training is needed. I've been calling for the government to raise the local taxes for a long time so this can be accomplished but until then many departments do not have the funding to provide ammunition let alone serious firearms training which can require hundreds of rounds per person. Now is this the fault of the department or the civilian government? Who knows.

If the police are lacking firearms training then they shouldn't be issued guns until they can have the proper training.

Police already do have firearms training. It is just a matter of more being better. There is no reason to not issue them guns besides satisfying the juvenile hardon that would give you.

[SVPD]

So booting somebody in the face might be something not worth punishing now? Apologize harder and the cops might just like you more.

Who said anything of the sort? All I said is that it is improper to punish him before the entire process is complete. If they are taking away his pay before that, then I was wrong: The police commanders in this instance ARE susceptible to committing unethical violations of due process rights due to public pressure.

Hmm, arresting an innocent person sure sounds like assault to me. It's no different than me kicking a stranger in the teeth, yet more common because police are allowed to use force in situations where it isn't required. Also, that justification can be as weak as 'I dropped my weapon while pulling this innocent dude from his vehicle. I didn't feel safe anymore so I beat him a little.' Frankly that should never be allowed and officers should have a better hold on their weapons and not be running around with their holsters unbuckled.

Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Thus, by your logic, arresting anyone is an assault.

Arresting an innocent person is not assault. Arresting a person without probable cause is false arrest, not assault. The courts and the legislature have established this. It does not matter, however, if there is probable cause, whether the person is later found guilty or not; that is unknowable at the time of arrest.

I was talking about the officer involved in a hit and run. However, kicking anybody in the face isn't going to be the way to subdue them efficiently especially when they're clearly no threat. Any force beyond placing the cuffs on your average person is going to be excessive yet police get a free pass. It should be no force unless you can prove you needed it to the same standards as any other self defense case.

So now I'm supposed to read your mind while you arbitrarily jump from anecdote to anecdote?

As for the rest, it already is no force at all unless the person is resisting. As for any other self defense case, no, it should not be like that. The police have a duty to confront and arrest dangerous people; a civilian only needs to protect themselves. You cnnot obligate the police to deal with criminals, then demand that they behave in the same way as a citizen with no such obligation.

Clearly not, and the justifications police get to use are pretty damn thin. They should be held to civilian standards for use of force. They would obviously still get away with using force because they face more danger than the average civilian does, but many more cases would see excessive force punishments metted out which helps everybody.

No, clearly it does have to be justified. The law is quite clear on that, both statutory and case law. The fact that it has not been justified to your satisfaction is irrelevant; it needs to be justified to the courts and the legislature, not to you. Additional punishments would not help everyone, they'd help you get more opportunities to jack off.

Nearly a year is a bit long for a pretty cut and dry case of physical abuse. Of course this asshole is noted for stalling his cases by not appearing in court.

According to you it's a bit long. Why? Because it gives you another excuse to bitch? I don't see it as that long at all given that courts often move at a glacial pace.

That quote is from the head police officer you moron, not from the article writer.

So?

Of course he's going to support his man, that's a major part of his job.

No, it is not part of his job, and the fact that you assume he is going to support his man right or wrong only indicates your own bias and procilvity for begging the question.

The repo man wasn't resisting, did you even watch the video I linked to? Why would an innocent man be resisting arrest?

I did, and I wouldn't say he "wasn't resisting" and quite frankly a lot of innocent people resist arrest because everyone is innocent until proven guilty. Lots of people think they haven't done anything wrong, not resisting or resisting says nothing about guilt or innocence.

It seems far more likely that the cops were so aggressive that they didn't give him time to properly park his truck and that events happened the way the injured party said they did.

It seems more likely to you because you make up your mind based on your own biases.

Besides, if you're innocent then you have every reason not to want to go to cells for a crime that a simple phone cal would have told you wasn't actually a crime. But hey, why should we expect the police to do that when pulling guys out of trucks is far easier.

Make up your mind. Are you complaining about the probable cause for the arrest, or the amount of force?

While the officer might not attack you, there are a greater number of cops percentage wise who might harm you than there are in the general population. Also, in any dealing with police, guilty or not, you have a greater chance of being harmed than in dealing with regular people. Do you feel that these stats are somehow wrong?

Uh, no there are not. Not only is it "almost certainly won't harm you" unless you think these constables have only dealt with a dozen or so citizens in their careers, you don't have any math to support this other than your incredibly flawed assumptions you already made.

So given the fact that at least 3 officers have been involved in either excessive force cases or hit and runs in 2010 that number seems pretty close to accurate. So we know that harm was caused in at least 3 of my 5 and a half supposed cases. So you're going to dispute that 2 more cases might be justified?

I have no idea. It's irrelevant anyhow; you are still attempting to generalize to the police in general from a few cases. Even your argument about the general population is stupid; the general population is so much larger and the police numbers so small in absolute size that a comparison is meaningless. One incident with the police shoots the percentages through the roof, but it conveniently leaves out total interactions, and in any case there is no meaningful comparison with interactions for civilians.

The bottom line here is that you are still attempting to justify bigotry.

[SVPD]

Also hate when seemingly professionals unload like mental at the first shot, expect them to have better trigger discipline than the average citizen.

I think the problem is, particularly for the average cop on the street, is that when you have a target/perp/whatever reaching for a weapon or posing a threat, you want to put them down, now, and you don't want them getting up again. The best way to do this is to unload into them. It's not just trigger discipline, it's eliminating a threat, and probably a little panic fire for a couple of them (or maybe all. Who knows if they've shot outside a range before).

That speaks to them needing better firearms training. Something like a military style course would be helpful to teach them not to unload in such a way that they injure bystanders.

No amount of firearms training can remedy the stress of seeing someone pulling a weapon on you. Do you really have any clue at all what combat is like, especially combat involving deadly weapons. There are a lot of psychological limitations that people have that simply cannot be overcome.

Here's a hint: It's nothing like your experience playing WH40K.

[Big Phil]

In the thread a while back with the SWAT team that shot an ex-Marine in his home during a raid, many people were criticizing the police for have military style training.

Today, as a result of this shooting, many people are criticizing the police for NOT having military style training.


Talk about absurd...

[SVPD]

Umm.. if the cameraman is the passanger, the cop is in front of him, and he's pointing a gun to the passanger's right, whixh he is, he's not pointing it at the driver. He's pointing it to the right side of the car (the cop's left).

In the shot you pointed out it does sort of look like he's pointing it at the cameraman. However, the fact remains that the cameraman was in posession of evidence and had fled inside a car when the police came in his direction. Granted, they were looking pretty aggressive, but on the other hand the cops have just been in a shooting and now this guy, who was perfectly content to stand around when bullets were flying, runs to a car. How do they know what he has in there?

There is no question about it, he was pointing at them. As to whether it was justified or not or it can be excused, different issue.

Fair enough

[SVPD]

In this case dealing with them properly would mean dealing with your officers in such a way that they understand their job and a quota isn't needed.

And your extensive experience in law enforcement supervision tells you this? I hate to break it to you, but concrete performence standards generally are better then simply ephemeral ones. "Not needing a quota" is not the goal; the police doing their jobs without being pushed into unethical conduct is. This quota shows no evidence of pushing unethical behavior, thus it is acceptable. You are objecting to quotas just because they are quotas and because you see an opportunity for cricticism. All you're doing is objecting to semantics based on a dishonest motive.

Except that most businesses can suspend you without pay for less and do so before any disciplinary hearing so you don't have anything resembling a point. Suspension without pay =/= legal action you moron.

Can they? Where is your evidence of this? I know of no business that is legally allowed to suspend someone without pay for no reason whatsoever. Even in the case of at-will employees, the business must still abide by its own discipline policy.

Moreover, police officers agree to certain standards when they sign up, and in return the government agrees to certain standards. One of those is due process, and that pay may not be suspended until a finding of wrongdoing is made. Any police officer would be fool to accept employment without such protections/ They are in place precisely to keep the department honest, and force it to afford due process rather than simply reacting to citizen outrage, much as defendants are allowed certain rights rather than a summary lynching. In other words, these processes are in place to protect police officers from what is essentially a lynch mob made up of people like you.

Are you really trying to tell me that police officers never use excessive amounts of force without anybody doing anything about it? Hell, Mantler has gotten off at least once on something SVPD agreed was excessive force.

Obviously some cases slip through the cracks. So what? Perfection is not a realistic goal.

Is dragging a man who's doing his job out of a truck and forcing him to the ground hard enough that he has bruises, facial lacerations, and ends up missing teeth excessive? Hell was that arrest even warranted at all given that he followed all his work guidelines and the company truck he was driving was for a company authorized to seize the boat.

The only relevant questions are A) was there probable cause for the arrest and B) was reasonable force used in making it? The two ar not related except insofar as an arrest without PC shouldn't be made in the first place, eliminating the need for any force. The fact that the guy was later determined to be innocent does not establish anything about the reasonableness of the force or the existance of probable cause.

Dragging a man from a truck when he's trying to explain that he works for a repossession agency comes to mind. In this case they had no reason to think he could flee given that he was stuck in traffic on a busy bridge. Would it have caused any great trouble to let him get the paperwork that would have prevented any officer needing to touch him in the first place? Hell you can't even claim that he was a flight risk as he never once made a move to escape.

This isn't an explaination at all. This is a bunch of assumptions about what the police knew, and based on KS's quote regarding the incident doesn't even reflect the facts of the case. You can't use the fact that the repo man was not committing a crime to establish anything; you have to go with the facts vailable to the officers at the time, and stuck in traffic is not a reason to approach a suspected felon and politely start asking if he has a reasonable explanation for breaking into a car.

No, I'm pretty sure it took them a long while to even start the investigation on him given that this case happened in August 2010 and his suspension without pay didn't occur until January 2011. So it took them around 5 months to actually get him behind a desk and of the streets and then a further 2 months filled with public outcry to suspend him without pay, you know suspend him the way any other shitty employee would have been.

In other words, you have no idea, and in the process, you admit that the police officials above him are unethical shits who should be fired for suspending him without pay based on public outcry.

As for failure to appear, police should be held to a higher standard, they cannot flout the law while still upholding it.

Don't give me this "held to a higher standard" bullshit. Police can only be held to a higher standard administratively. In court, they are citizens. They should be held to the standards every other citizen is held to in terms of the nature of proceedings, which includes failure to appear. "Held to a higher standard" is code for "without the same rights".

I'm saying that in this, and likely many other cases, the police didn't need to even touch the guy. Had they given him a few seconds to reach into his dash, or had they pulled out the papers for him. Not to mention that had I been dragged out of my vehicle while trying to explain what's going on I doubt I would be playing limp while an officer was manhandling me. In this case they caught the wrong guy and had they just read the side of his truck and talked to him first they wouldn't have needed to touch him. Can you really argue that the truck or the boat were going anywhere on a busy traffic filled bridge?

In other words, they should have done something different because you don't like it, and are utterly untrained and ignorant of how to deal with a suspected felony in progress.

Okay, police can use force to arrest you even if you haven't actually committed a crime. Hell, they can actually enter your home, shoot at you, your family and your pet without you ever having done anything criminal. You hear a struggle outside and go to your window with a legally owned weapon in hand and you get shoot. So if your interaction with the police involves you getting arrested you have a good chance of experiencing something that, if a civilian did it, would be considered an assault.

All complete nonsense fantasy, based on generalizing from "it has happened in the past at least once" to "the police can do it with impunity at any time".

Given that there is a less than 1% chance of being a victim of violent crime in my city, and I've shown that a larger than 1% number of police have been written up on excessive force charges. I would also contend that any force used on a person that is innocent is also excessive so that number is bound to be fair higher than that. Thus even for an innocent person your chances of meeting what they would consider violent force is higher than the risk of being involved with violent crime.

You've shown no such thing. Your math is completely flawed. Do you actually have evidence that over 1% of the people in your city are victims of police violence? No? I thought not.

I was saying that SVPD would be retarded for not believing that 5 cases of police behavior of 22 reported could actually be objectionable given that I've already shown the 3 cases were objectionable. Is it not reasonable that 2 more cases might also be objectionable of the 19 remaining reports?

No. It's not. You're simply assuming a certain level of misbehavior based on your own predjudices.

[Elheru Aran]

In the thread a while back with the SWAT team that shot an ex-Marine in his home during a raid, many people were criticizing the police for have military style training.

Today, as a result of this shooting, many people are criticizing the police for NOT having military style training.


Talk about absurd...

SWAT =! regular cops. The issue in that thread was they invaded a house, the guy pulled a rifle and they shot him 60+ times (IIRC). Easy enough to do when you've got automatic weapons. 'Military style training' makes sense for SWAT, as they're equipped with heavier weapons than your standard cop, and they're often going up against armed opponents.

Here, they were unloading pistols at a car and hitting bystanders (possibly). Here, the issue with their weapons control is, did they really need to shoot that much and they needed better accuracy. Plus apparently a cop and the guy who filmed this had a run-in that didn't end well for the guy's phone.

It does look somewhat absurd, but the fact is that there are different types of police officer, and as such different training methods make sense to a point. The need here, where police forces across the US are lacking, is for *better* weapons training to prevent collateral damage and/or excessive force.

[Kamakazie Sith]

SWAT =! regular cops. The issue in that thread was they invaded a house, the guy pulled a rifle and they shot him 60+ times (IIRC). Easy enough to do when you've got automatic weapons. 'Military style training' makes sense for SWAT, as they're equipped with heavier weapons than your standard cop, and they're often going up against armed opponents.

Actually, he was only hit 22 times. Five team members engaged him so even if it was 60 times that would be 12 rounds per officer.

Here, they were unloading pistols at a car and hitting bystanders (possibly). Here, the issue with their weapons control is, did they really need to shoot that much and they needed better accuracy. Plus apparently a cop and the guy who filmed this had a run-in that didn't end well for the guy's phone.

Again, this was a combat situation. How do you know this is a training issue? When you compare it with observed military operations in what way is this result different?

It does look somewhat absurd, but the fact is that there are different types of police officer, and as such different training methods make sense to a point. The need here, where police forces across the US are lacking, is for *better* weapons training to prevent collateral damage and/or excessive force.

It is absurd. In this situation the police are being evaluated by people that do not have any combat experience. Watch the video. Did it appear that any of the officers were shooting from poor stances or waving their firearms around recklessly?