Weapons of Mass Distraction

Trigger Happy Policing Was: Cops again: Something about this smells fishy November 25, 2006

If you haven’t ever heard it, I suggest you go and find Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues”. You can read the lyrics here and tell me, if we just changed the “Rockets, moon shots” line to “Bogus Wars” how much more relevant would the song be today?

An 88 year old woman has been shot to death by Atlanta police. The old gal did manage to wound three officers and now even the informant comes forward and says that he didn’t tell the cops that drugs were being dealt from Johnston’s home. (There is some debate as to the womans age, more reports are coming in saying she was 92 years old.)

This is yet another instance of police CYA. They screwed up, raided the wrong house and grandma kept her trusty shotgun nearby.

It’s funny – saw the news about this on CNN earlier. Keyron couldn’t figure out why they would shoot an 88 year old woman. I asked him, if his no deceased grandmother wouldn’t have done the same thing and he agreed she would have gone out in a blaze of glory too. Here’s the thing that most people don’t know. The police are a reactive force, they only show up once the event is either happening or is over. The woman they gunned down probably understood this, and when they probably kicked in her door, did what any sane person would do. She grabbed her gun and started blasting. The old saying goes like this: “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

I guess things are a little different down south. But to me, it’s good different. You need to have a healthy dose of wariness when it comes to policing agencies. What’s the old saying, people don’t become police officers because they’re humanitarians? It’s true. At 19 PPD was recruiting, friend of mine begged me to go with him and sign up. Even then I knew it wasn’t a good idea because:

a) If there’s one thing cops have plenty of, it’s time on their hands.
i) What is that other saying, idle hands are the playground of evil?
b) I tend to like people too much to have to enforce rules.

So without further adieu, I’d love to see more oversight of policing agencies because it’s been demonstrated again and again that there’s racial profiling, rights abuses, etc. going on in nearly every department.

First it’s reading about how cops treat epileptics. Tasering isn’t the way things should be done and cops seem a little too eager to use the damned things.

But this one reeks to high heaven. It isn’t mentioned in the article per se, but the people that were shot were black. I would hope that the NYPD gets sued to high heaven on this one. Cops need to learn that deadly force is to be taken as an absolute LAST measure. I’m going to be waiting to see what happens because this story could wake people up once and for all.

First, our law enforcement agencies have been corrupted, but then that has always been the case. The question is, how do we stop the corruption?

Second, when are we going to demand more rigorous training for police officers? Right now the training they receive is pretty light considering the job.

But there’s more on the story here. It stinks even more because now it’s said that they tried to ram an undercover cop, and that they backed into an unmarked police van. This sounds like a CYA thing.

And yet more information is forthcoming. The article says it is unclear whether the undercover police officers identified themselves as police officers.

Back a few years ago Patrollman (posthumously Sargeant) Cornell Young Jr. was gunned down by fellow officers responding to a complaint at a local diner.

Young was in plain clothes, and on coming out of the diner after the suspect, didn’t do what training says you ALWAYS do. Show your badge, not hold your gun gangster style. He died because of his own stupidity and two cops had their lives essentially ruined because not only did they shoot and kill a fellow officer, they shot and killed a fellow officer who happened to be black whose father was a Major in said police department. So it never came out that Sgt. Young was at least partly responsible for his own death.

And I should mention that over the past 20 years ago I have worked with many detectives who were doing details. When they’d move on someone I never heard them identify as police, nor did most produce a badge/identification. With that in mind I can completely believe that these undercovers didn’t immediately produce badges. Even other NYPD detectives are saying this a major Charlie Foxtrot. Holy hell that is about to rain down on the NYPD and it is going to be ugly, rightfully so.

Now of course its coming out that the undercovers had been drinking at the club. I can understand why that would be the case since in order to blend in, you’d need to behave like a regular.

The latest article says that 50 rounds were fired, 21 hitting the car. And interestingly I belive the capacity of standard issue weaponry is 10 rounds and one officer reloaded and emptied a second clip. The response was excessive, as was evidenced by the fact that the police had to trot out that the two men in the hospital had rap sheets. So what, that gave them no right to shoot.

The article referenced above also mentions the involvement of the Reverend Al Sharpton. Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Kelly had better be VERY careful how they handle this. But it appear lately that trigger happy police are everywhere. As I said earlier, we need to make sure police are adequately trained, and also made aware of sanctions for shootings, abuse, etc.