I was curious, so I checked the websites. It seems that Bellaire and Houston offer about the same starting pay (~ $45k), and both say they offer health benefits, 401(k), etc. Of course, no indication of which has the better benefits.
one thing that confuses me about the incident as described - if the boy was on the ground in the driveway and only raised up slightly, why did two shots miss and hit the house before he was finally hit? on the other hand, i would like to know why the police were following the vehicle at all. no way do i believe they were told the vehicle was stolen. of course, the officer did take a course in racial profiling, so i imagine he's pretty good at it.
Maybe he's from somewhere near Bellaire and wanted to make sure he was employed/patrolled close to home?
They were actually in the narrow walk way leading up to the house the chronicle had pictures of where they were on their site yesterday. I would say they were about 6 to 7 feet from their front door. Because it is real life and not the movies or TV. Even with a lot of training shooting a handgun and being dead on with it is extremely difficult especially when you are not at point blank range. Simply pulling too hard with you trigger finger can send a bullets trajectory off by several feet. Add in the fact that this looked like an unexpected snap decision and the adrenilene and its not suprising he missed. Truth be told in a majority of shootings the miss rate is generally always high. Rarely do you see an officer clover-holing his shots in a suspect like you see in the movies. When they ran they plates the dispatch came back with the erroneous information that the SUV was stolen.
See the thing is that the statement below: Almost NEVER EVER results in tangible discipline or a change in police methods or the "blue wall of silence". So, until some action is taken, **** the police. And all cops are assholes.
After re-reading it, they first said shot in the driveway and a couple of paragraphs later said in the walkway near the front door. If that's the case, it's easy to see how the first two went into the house. Still, I don't see how dispatch comes back that the vehicle was stolen. The officer provides them the license plate number, dispatch punches it into their computer and the computer either finds a match or it doesn't. Are we to believe dispatch accidentally said it was stolen? Or that someone had a typo when entering in another stolen vehicle that just happened to match the kid's plate? of course, at this point, you only have the accused officer's statement saying that he received information from dispatch that the vehicle was stolen.
This actually happened to me once in New York as dispatch reversed that last two numbers of the plate and it came back stolen. Its rare for you to actually get a hit back but it does happen from time to time. In my case after requestioning again I had them rerun the plates one more time to be sure and sure enough the car was not stolen. All the driver got was a ticket for running a red light and that was the end of it. Those conversations between dispatch and officers are generally recorded as they happen. At least where I worked.
It could also be that dispatch made a typo when they were querying the database and didn't notice, pulling a record for an unrelated stolen car. What I wonder about is that the article says they ran the plates "as a routine matter." I would assume they ran the plates because they were young black males driving a nice car.
