White cop shoots 74 year old black vet during welfare check

Are you serious?

Someone pulls a gun on you as an officer, and you have your gun pulled as well... and you tell him to put the gun down and he doesn't... you expect the officer to leave his card and leave the house?

A bullet proof vest doesn't stop a bullet to the face BTW.

Also, they broke into the house at the request of his family and because he was being non responsive.

I don't doubt you have good intentions, I just strongly suspect that you are not familiar with the training the officers undergo and the reality of the situation.

If I had to hazzard a guess, it is that the whole situation lasted a few seconds. The officers entered the home with weapons drawn (reasonable when you have a welfare check and someone is non responsive). The officers announce they are officers (as they always do, if for only their own preservation). The officer enters the room, the old man raises his gun at the officer, the officer tells him to drop his weapon now, the old man motions the gun either more directly at the officer or makes a movement towards the officer and ends up dead.

Want to change the rule for welfare checks (they are required to do them in a small window of time or otherwise their are threads about how the officer was negligent not checking quicker)? Okay, but there are consequences for that.
Want to try and get all the hand guns off the street and out of people's homes so that officers dont have to pull their service revolver? Okay.

Want to investigate the whole event? Absolutely

Want to have mandatory body cameras? I support that too, I think it will actually clear officers many times, and when it implicates them, throw the book at them.

However, this idea that the officer just decided to waste some 74 year old senior citizen because he has blood lust is a real stretch.

 

You're right we don't know enough to really pass judgement. Which is alright because we're not so empowered. A grand jury would be able to see if charges were warranted. As citizens, we have some responsibility to ask the questions to make sure our governmental agencies are doing their jobs and looking at this. If there's something that looks to us like a crime and an abuse of power by a civil servant we should be asking for the details to be sure the government is conducting itself appropriately. Just as we shouldn't form a lynch mob to go get this guy, neither should we stick our heads in the sand and just assume he must have had good cause. Let the PD feel the pressure, conduct their internal affairs investigation or grand jury inquiry and come back to the public with a reasoned and detailed answer to what happened and what they're going to do about it. If they have a good justification, I'll back off. They haven't given us enough yet, and what they have given us looks like an abuse of power.

 

Yes, I'm serious. If a cop comes into my house uninvited, I shouldn't have to put my gun down; he should leave. The request from some family member does not constitute an invitation to come in. It may be probable cause but it shouldn't abrogate my right to protect my home from invaders.

As for the police training -- that's exactly my complaint, which you'll notice if you look at my participation in all these other cop homicide threads. Cops are trained to minimize their own personal risk at the expense of the citizens' risk. That's wrong. Don't straw-man that; obviously they have some responsibility for self-preservation, but they take it too far and too often impose certain death on citizens to avoid a far less certain risk to themselves.

I don't think this cop came in looking for blood. I think he came in expecting to find a corpse and was surprised to find someone pointing a gun at him and he feared for his life. The problem is that he resolved that problem with his gun instead of keeping his head. The victim here seems to have done a better job keeping his cool, refraining from pulling the trigger even though it'd be very reasonable for him to fear for his own life.

 

Our cops shoot too many people. . . .. period

Rocket River

 

You might think that, and in some ways I understand it, but it sounds an awful lot like a great way to get killed. You better make sure you have adequate cover and that you out-gun them if you want to take a harsh stance like that.

 

Me thinks that's JVs point. The police appear to have decided to out-gun the old man rather than defuse the situation in some other way when it doesn't appear the situation warranted it.

Could the police have not surrendered and backed away with the ones in the rear maintaining cover? It it does not appear their training prioritized the safety of anyone but themselves here.

 

Why would you prioritize the safety of anyone but the officer? Honest question. An officer that will lower his weapon when someone is holding a gun on him is an officer that probably won't live long. This likely wouldn't have been a problem without extraordinary circumstances.

I think a good question is why wouldn't the guy seek cover instead of trying to be John Wayne about the situation? A vet should know better. If there are multiple potential gunmen, you don't stand out in the open with a gun drawn unless you want to get shot.

 

Exactly... I think the guy was scared. From what I've read he's only been on the force since 2012 so he's a newbie which would make him jumpy. The police department would probably be better served to have more experienced officers doing that. And from what I've read officers (plural) entered the house and only one of them fired.

We can't become a society that continuously make excuses for incompetence of authority figures with power. More is expected of them so we have the right to question what they do. Which is something we do with everyone so police officers are not exempt.

If they had time to command that the man put his gun down... They probly had time to back out.

 

Who is "you" when you say "you"? The policeman's incentive is to prioritize his own safety (unless he has some regard for the sanctity of life and any courage of his convictions). The police department can be a bit more balanced in weighing the life of the officer against the life of the citizen. Their own self-interests weigh heavily on keeping the officer alive and covering up for any homicides he may commit along the way, but they do have to consider what blowback they might get from bad PR (like how whole swathes of the populace don't trust them), or prosecutions. But, I was thinking of "you" as us -- the citizens who elect officials to make policy. And for us, our self-interest is to strike a good balance between the safety of the officer and of the citizen. If you don't look after the officer enough, the job becomes unattractive and you don't get quality people working as cops anymore. If you don't look after the citizen enough, you get dead citizens, a police force acting with impunity, and public distrust. Right now, we lean heavy on protecting the officer and not hard enough on protecting the citizen.

 

You have a right to protect yourself and the officer has a right to protect himself.

Again, had the cop not entered the home, and had the man died or been in distress we would be hearing about how the officer didn't do his duty.

Let me make it clear, I do not think that you hate the police or assume that they are all terrible. I disagree with you on the issue of officer safety.

I think that there are marginal changes that can be made. However, ultimately you are talking about tense situations that are resolved in a few seconds. I don't think you will ever have officers trained to leave the home when a home owner pulls a gun. I also do not think you will see officers told to put themselves in even more harm. My perspective is different than yours based on my role as a former FP.

Sorry but that is unrealistic. You cannot expect an officer to have someone point a a gun at them and expect them to put their own welfare at risk and attempt to flee the situation. The police have never been trained to act that way as far as I know.

As far as the homeowner keeping his cool, perhaps or his reaction skills at 74 are slower than the cop.

I want to make something clear, this is not an easy situation. Put yourself in the place of a 74 year old single man living in his home. He may have been asleep, and he may not have understood what the officers were saying when beating on his door or when they kicked his door in. Most likely he suspected he was a victim of a break in. He may very well have had vision problems or dementia. I don't really blame him.

However I also do not really blame the officer. He has received a call for a welfare check. They (I assume) attempted to call, they knocked on the door and identified themselves. They went through the back door and probably the lights were off. The officer has someone pointing a gun at him and has asked the person to put the gun down and didn't.

It is a sad situation all the way around.

 

It's there job

Rocket River

 

By "you" I meant the officer. I'm pretty sure they care about the sanctity of their own life more so than the life of someone they don't know that is holding a gun on them. Crazy, I know.

"Their" job was to check on the old man....who pulled a gun on them then making their job to eliminate the threat. They first tried to eliminate the threat by telling the man to put his gun down, he refused so they shot him thus eliminating the threat. It's not the movies, you don't pull a gun on someone unless you intend on using it, thus the cops had to assume he planned on using the gun.

 

Calling the family: "So....ummmm....we have some good news, and some bad news. Good news: Dad was OK..."

what happened to "protect and serve"

 

Probably because his job is to serve the public, and he's the one intruding into someone else's property in middle of the night. You don't create a potentially dangerous situation with an innocent person and then shoot your way out of it and blame the other guy.

Probably because he's 74 years old, half or mostly asleep at 11:30pm, and is recovering from surgery. There's a good chance he has no clue what's going on or why someone has broken into his house.

We should not be creating situations where everyone doing the "right" thing results in a citizen dying. Someone didn't do the right thing, and it's hard to fault the 74 year old pointing a gun at an intruder in middle of the night. Let's keep in mind that he didn't fire his weapon.

 

Said the person that think gun is regulated like car.

 

They were protecting and serving. They didn't just go busting down doors, they were asked to check on someone for fear that they were in danger, that person put the police officers in danger and ended up dead. When a cop tells you to put a gun down, you do it or you die. Pretty simple.

Again, those police officers were asked to do so, they didn't just go knocking down doors for no reason. As to "someone didn't do the right thing", you're right, the old man didn't do the right thing when he refused to lower his gun. You can't hold police at gunpoint safely, not complicated.

Ignorant strawman argument, par for the course for you.

 

The only surefire way to prevent that is to just not do anything at all. After all, the same thing could have happened during the middle of the day. Is your contention that the police should just stop performing welfare checks (a service that I'm sure provides help 99.9% of the time), just because there is a very rare chance it will end with someone being shot?

 

No wonder you make excuses for incompetence.

On the other page you simply called the old man 'stupid'... So what is it going to be...???

That's an excuse for incompetence. Receiving a call for a welfare check has nothing to do with the officer gunning down a man in his home.

 

I'll take that. I went a bit overboard there.

You did run away from your point that car isn't banned just because they are dangerous when in fact cars are specifically banned in many situations and are heavily regulated just because it is dangerous. You can't said anything close to that for gun.

 

I don't have the time today I had yesterday to talk about current events. So, I'll depart with this one thought. I don't want a country where policemen can come uninvited to your house when you've done nothing wrong, kill you, and then plead self-defense. I don't want a country where a self-appointed neighborhood watchman can decide to stalk a citizen walking on the streets, kill him when confronted, and then plead self-defense. Other people obviously feel differently. I will use what small voice I have to change the system to what I want. Those other people will use their small voices to change the system to what they want. And, I guess we have to live with the results.