Police Contributing to Positive Race Relations. Again

Talk me through the details that lead you to believe this is an accident?

Surely cops are trained before being handed a weapon?

Guy on the deck, hands up. Other guy beside him, playing with a tonka truck. Neither are making moves towards anyone. At what point do you draw your gun? At what point do you decide to unclip/flick off the safety catch on your weapon to allow yourself to accidentally shoot someone who looking at the video evidence, does not appear to be threatning you?

It's Florida. I bet the only requirement to get on the force is an absence of neck gills.

QFT

The original call said the autistic guy had a gun so when the police arrived on scene they had guns drawn already.

What leads him and me to think it was more accident then intentional is that it was a single shot and no other officer on the scene fired their weapon. A lot of times when one officer starts firing other officers will also start firing.

Yes the cop was trained. Training has never stopped anyone from fucking up which is what it looks like this cop did. Probably had his finger on the trigger when he shouldn't have which would be a violation of his training. He was, like myself, trained that the finger stays off the trigger until you go to fire the weapon. In a stress situation it's easy to to be startled and very often when you're startled your hands will tense up. A finger on the trigger in this situation could result in firing the weapon.

Three shots.

Speaking of Zombie's reply:

http://www.cracked.com/personal-exp...-country-with-no-guns-6-startling-truths.html

Was gonna post that eventually, but this seems like a good place to stick it.

I'll say right off the bat that the cop they interviewed acknowledged that he knows removing gus in American forces will not solve our problems. But he does discuss how diffusion of a situation it taught from day one as the priority and not as a last option.

Lots of good stuff in there.

My bad. It was three shots. Thought it was one.

That makes the cop even more lame. You take three shots and miss with two and one hits a guy you weren't pointing the weapon at?

Still though..... no other officer on the scene saw a need to fire their weapon.

It's ok. He wasn't trying to shoot the black guy. He was trying to shoot the retard playing with a toy truck!

Your point stands, but autism =/= mental handicap in the way you're thinking of.

Just so you know.

Once again, Faceman cuts to the heart of the issue!

That escalated quickly.

That depends on how rough Pally likes it.

IIRC the guidelines for law enforcement personnel are that anyone with any hostile intent are considered a threat even if unarmed if they are within 8 yards (24 feet) and armed replies are allowable.

You're saying there was hostile intent?

I don't have a clue. This incident is of no interest to me at all.

Then shut up. Idiot.

What Zombie said.

Read up, then come back to the adult table.

Three shots with a rifle at close range against a stationary target with no hits/inadvertent hit to bystander?

Does not compute.

Even if you think it was malevolent, the gross inaccuracy is hard to account for.

Three shots? Unless the gun was full auto, it's hard to account for that happening other than deliberately. Substance problem/seizure/mental breakdown?

Training. You can pull that trigger a lot of times before your brain says stop. We are after all talking fractions of a second.

We also don't know if the gun was semi-auto only or a gun capable of a three round burst.

On the bright aide this guy just became a millionaire. In many states cops, fireman, and teachers don't get paid much so they end up with the Daytons of the world doing those jobs instead of the best and brightest. You get what you pay for.

I have a hard time believing that a cop not under fire could take not one not two but three deliberate shots at that distance and fail to solidly hit the target (whoever you think that was). I say this as a fairly experienced rifleman.

Surely every driver gets trained before they get their license. Training does not mean people can't do stupid things.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying there isn't a lot here to criticize. Clearly something (probably more than one thing) went wrong. My main point is that this does not appear to be racist malevolence.

If it should turn out this was a full-auto/burst weapon, then accident is again most reasonable.

To those who don't know: full-auto weapons fire continuously (and quickly) so long as the trigger is pressed. A weapon with a burst capability will fire some number of shots (typically three) with a single press of the trigger.

A single inadvertent stress-induced press of the trigger on these types of weapons could account for three inaccurate shots. The gun would have been pointed in the direction of the targets (though not necessarily directly at either) and, if the officer inadvertently fired, three rounds would've zipped off before the officer could get the gun back under control.

If the gun was semi-auto, of course, that couldn't happen.

Yes this confuses me too. In my military common sense gun-toting mind, priority #1 is "evaluate the threat." This situation spells out "stand down" at every single level. I've been surrounded by some scary people - and an unarmed counselor on his back with his hands up explaining the situation in perfect english next to a retarded guy (not to be crude, but let's be honest here) playing with a toy truck just doesn't get my adrenaline cranking up to eleven. Not saying I'm a macho man or anything, but I guess it takes a little more than that to get me to take my weapon off of "safe" and put it on "semi" if you get my drift.

No he's not.

He'll get a nice sized check but the odds of him walking out with a seven figure sum are small.

In this state he would be. Did this occur in one of the red states which did "tort reform" which effectively enables bad behavior by making them, more or less, immune to the full fall out of their misdeeds?

Agreed - I see your point. That said at what point would this cop ever think he needed a three-round burst versus shooting semi auto? Was he laying down cover fire for his partner to advance?
They were not taking fire - unless a guy on his back with his hands in the air and an autistic guy sitting on his ass are a force to be reckoned with. Was this cop even vaguely familiar with his weapon or combat situations in general? Fuck I'm 54 years old and could still handle that situation better and safer. I just don't get it, I really don't.

Give me a fucking break. This has jack shit to do with red/blue state. Some blue states enable bad cop behavior as much as red states.

We don't seem to have info on the weapon so can't know if this is the case.

I'm against regular cops having full-auto as (1) it's superfluous and excessive for virtually all civilian interactions and (2) it can be especially dangerous if mishandled. Got no problem with tactical/SWAT units having guns with fun switches, though.

No he wouldn't. Even in your state.

What determines the size of the payout is what happened and how badly it happened. If he was killed then yes his family would get a huge payout. Or if the police beat him to within an inch of his life he would get a huge payout. In this case though he was wounded. Slightly. He's alive and well as judging from his interview in the hospital. He's already been released from the hospital.

This is not a seven figure payout scenario.

I'd bet it was a semi-auto.