May 23, 2013 @ 12:19 PM
From the Washington Post:
According to police, Dawkins, 22, a shuttle driver for the “PBS NewsHour,” was fatally shot by an off-duty Arlington County sheriff’s deputy. Family members say they are still struggling to understand why.
“He was a working guy. Didn’t bother nobody,” said Curtis Dawkins, Julian Dawkins’s father. “It’s just so sad and senseless that these things had to occur.”
The officer was interviewed, but not charged. Police declined to offer details about the incident.
May 22, 2013 @ 11:43 AM
From the Austin American-Statesman:
Driving in the early morning hours to his job at a metal shop in Buda, Miguel Montanez at first thought the approaching lights were a school bus or a tow truck.
But Montanez says it was a Hays County SWAT truck that rammed his car head-on. As they collided, another police vehicle pinned him from behind, he says.
He heard a shot.
“I saw my windshield crack, and I ducked down as low as possible,” Montanez said. “I really thought I was going to die.”
Seconds later, he says, three deputies were pointing assault rifles at him. “That’s when I heard one of the officers say, ‘Oh, (expletive), we got the wrong guy,’ ” Montanez said.
First there’s the close-call on an innocent person losing his life. Next comes the troubling, circle-the-wagons response–which is 100% deliberate.
H/T: Instapundit
February 7, 2013 @ 1:44 PM
From the LA Times:
Two women who were shot by Los Angeles police in Torrance early Thursday during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer were delivering newspapers, sources said.
The women, shot in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue, were taken to area hospitals, Torrance police Lt. Devin Chase said. They were not identified. One was shot in the hand and the other in the back, according to Jesse Escochea, who captured video of the victims being treated.
It was not immediately known what newspapers the women were delivering. After the shooting, the blue pickup was riddled with bullet holes and what appeared to be newspapers lay in the street alongside.
To clarify/remind visitors here, the alleged crimes of ex-LAPD officer, Christopher Dorner, the subject of today’s manhunt, will not be listed here on the site. One of our criteria for news stories is that the person must have been police at the time of the wrongdoing. According to the news reports we’ve seen, Dorner has not been a police officer for some time.
January 22, 2013 @ 4:45 PM
From Denver CBSLocal.com:
An Adams County man is in shock after he says deputies shot and killed his dog.
Jeff Fisher said deputies went to his house by mistake. He said when they forced their way through the door his dog Ziggy ran outside and an Adams County Sheriff’s deputy shot and killed him.
“(He went to the door) to see who it was and the police officer shot him three times,” Fisher said. “They killed my dog for no reason.”
Video at the link above.
December 4, 2012 @ 11:15 AM
13 officers fire 137 rounds and kill Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.
Police say they fired in self-defense.
From Cleveland.com:
Russell ended up on a dead-end access road to an East Cleveland middle school, where the officers from various jurisdictions converged with the 13 Cleveland officers.
They surrounded the Malibu, and some officers were out of their cars when Russell rammed another police car, Gardner said.
Police are trained to use deadly force to stop a suspect from using a vehicle as a weapon. They opened fire.
The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office is running gunshot-residue tests on Russell’s and Williams’ hands to determine if either fired a gun. The results should be in before week’s end.
No gun was found in Russell’s car or along the chase route. No bullet or casing was found outside the Justice Center.
Pathologists at the Medical Examiner’s Office removed 20 rounds from Russell’s body and 16 from Williams’ body. They both had additional wounds from bullets that entered and exited their bodies — Russell had 30 wounds, Williams had 20, an investigator said.
November 1, 2012 @ 3:59 PM
From the Los Angeles Times:
The Los Angeles Police Department’s news release on an Oct. 12 officer-involved shooting seemed fairly routine.
Officers searching for several suspects who had fled after being stopped for questioning found one hiding under an SUV on Woodlawn Avenue in South L.A. The officers pulled the suspect out by his ankles, saw what looked like a metallic object in his hands and opened fire, critically wounding him.
But one crucial piece of information was left out of the release: The suspect’s hands were cuffed behind his back at the time and he was lying on his stomach.
October 27, 2012 @ 6:47 PM
From the Associated Press:
A Texas state trooper who fired on a pickup truck from a helicopter and killed two illegal immigrants during a chase through the desert was trying to disable the vehicle and suspected it was being used to smuggle drugs, authorities said Friday.
October 5, 2012 @ 2:25 PM
From today’s New York Times:
A New York police detective shot and killed an unarmed man, whose hands, a witness said, were on the steering wheel of his Honda, after he had been pulled over early Thursday for cutting off two police trucks on the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, the authorities said.
The shooting, which occurred at 5:15 a.m., was the latest in a series of episodes in which police officers fatally shot or wounded civilians. While the Police Department had explanations in the other instances, it could not immediately provide one for the shooting on Thursday.
Note this:
In all police-involved shootings, investigators are barred from talking to the officers who fired their weapon to prevent them from later claiming immunity from prosecution for what they said in an interview.
So all the witnesses are interviewed–except the officer that fired his weapon? That’s a policy that needs to change. When a civilian is involved in a shooting, detectives are anxious to question him/her right away. There’s no good reason for treating officers any differently.
September 23, 2012 @ 11:59 PM
From the Houston Chronicle:
Advocates are calling for better training and more discipline after a Houston police officer fatally shot a mentally ill double-amputee in a wheelchair on Saturday, the third unarmed person police have shot in less than three months….
“How difficult is it, if nothing else, to get away from someone in a wheelchair who has no weapon, has only one arm and one good leg?” asked Arlene Kelly, co-founder of Civilians Down, a support group for victims of police violence that tracks misconduct. “It’s totally and completely needless. Those officers should have had that matter well in hand. The gun should have never been out of the holster.”
September 21, 2012 @ 9:04 AM
From ABC News:
A 61-year-old man was shot to death by police while his wife was handcuffed in another room during a drug raid on the wrong house. Police admitted their mistake, saying faulty information from a drug informant contributed to the death of John Adams Wednesday night. They intended to raid the home next door.
One official, later in the article, claims that they did “the best surveillance we could do.” Really? Well, that’s not good enough.
The Cato raid map disproves the claim that these wrong door raids and violent deaths are “rare mistakes.”
UPDATE: We saw this item on the ABC News web site the day before this post, but an astute reader informs us that this incident is not recent and actually happened more than ten years ago.