If you watch the surveillance video of two New York police officers shooting the man who shot his ex-boss near the Empire State building yesterday, you’ll see the absolute opposite of the kind of fantasy event that is touted by gun advocates. The whole thing takes 15 seconds, there’s no time for the cops to do anything but pull their pistols and fire, and there are bystanders scattering everywhere. It appears that the man who was killed pulled his gun but didn’t fire a shot. Nine people were hit by bullets and bullet fragments, apparently all from the officers’ weapons.
Life is not a fucking movie. It doesn’t happen in slo-mo, and even well-trained cops have trouble controlling their fire. Adding in armed civilians to almost any scenario like this would make it worse, not better.
cathyx
Unfortunately, most people only have movies and video games to reference in these situations. And with a steady diet of them, clean shots and happy outcomes become expected.
Baud
@cathyx:
In the movies, only the bad guys miss easy kill shots.
Jamey
Sounds like somebody didn’t get the message that the 2d Amendment is, by far, the MOST important of God’s amendments…
Todd
In the mind of the wingnut, he has the accuracy and nerve of Mel Gibson or Bruce Willis, and the bad guy has the shooting ability of the Russian soldiers in the old N64 “GoldenEye” on easy setting.
Shawn in ShowMe
Fasers can’t’ come soon enough.
rob!
Why, it’s almost as if what the gun nuts say MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING SENSE.
cathyx
I don’t know what’s wrong with those cops. When I shoot a target on my video games, I always make a direct hit.
MattW
But..but…hunting! And target shooting! These are constitutionally-protected hobbies. Unlike lawn darts, which only killed four people, but was not constitutionally-protected…
Chyron HR
Well, those cops were stupid. They should have just kicked a blue shell at the shooter and knocked him over.
Robin G.
Post name win.
arguingwithsignposts
Maybe it’s just me, but that is quite possibly the most pedestrian “mass shooting” footage you could imagine.
maya
Whadda ya expect from a blue librul state! Now, if this happend Kentuck, or never MissaHippi or Texus……..
YellowJournalism
@Chyron HR: I don’t know why more cops don’t do this. When e bad guy disappears and leaves behind a gold coin, the police could collect it. Budget crisis solved!
salacious crumb
see that woman who leaves the little girl alone and runs in panic?
jp7505a
Given how quickly it occurred (and I had to watch it a couple of times to catch it all) it’s a miracle that more bystanders wern’t hurt or killed.
The pro-gun folks seem to think that every gun owner in a situation like that will shoot like Mat Dillion when in reality most will react like Barney Fife. It’s not because they are evil but simply because they havn’t trained for that one moment of crisis. It’s why pilots spend hours in flight simulators, firefighters practice on empty buildings at fire school, etc.
edmund dantes
The other thing is that most people don’t even train under the proper conditions to effectively react properly. Even those those that do train under the right conditions and best training possible know they can’t predict how a soldier will react in that situation.
The military has hundreds of years of expertise in training their soldiers to cope with the chaos of war, but even they know they can’t predict how someone will act or react in a high pressure, chaotic, and unknown firefight.
They still have people that freeze up. They have their fair share of friendly fire incidents. They have all kinds of problems.
These people are delusional that think they will be the “hero”.
BC
The Amado Diallo episode was my first datapoint in this hypothesis. In that event, the police fired 42 shots and hit him 19 times – which means that more than half of the shots fired went elsewhere. No one else was around, so the shots that went astray were essentially harmless. This event is my second datapoint.
Soonergrunt
And remember, these are guys who are required to qualify with that sidearm. I don’t know what the NYPD’s standards are, but as the largest police force in the country, and the most bureaucratic, there’s got to be SOME requirement.
But you wouldn’t know that from watching this incident. And I’m not bagging on them when I say that.
This shit is fucking hard. Even for trained personnel. I don’t know what they could have done better in that case, and it was a fucking fiasco.
@BC: And that was in a hallway at a range of less than 10 feet against an unarmed man. Leaving aside the moral and legal wrongness of it, it’s an example of exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a reason the Army doesn’t consider a pistol to be anything more than a purely defensive weapon.
dr. bloor
@Soonergrunt:
As it turns out, the police academy ran into ethical problems when they thought about having the officers train in situations where the paper silhouettes started shooting back from fifteen feet.
BC
@Soonergrunt: Yeah, the Diallo event was the closest we have come to the video game environment: only one person, person unarmed, police could get close, there was a light shining on this one person – and still they missed 23 out of 42 times.
SatanicPanic
@cathyx: Speak for yourself. In video games I spray fire wildly at anything that moves. I’d probably be worse in real life.
Villago Delenda Est
This, this, this.
Hey, all you torture supporters. I’m talking to you, Antonin “Fat Fascist Tony” Scalia.
Real life is not scripted like “24”. The “ticking time bomb scenario” is FICTION. Life does NOT WORK THAT WAY.
“It sounded like firecrackers”.
“It sounded like firecrackers”.
It DOESN’T SOUND LIKE IT DOES IN THE MOVIES OR ON TV!
Don’t John Wayne that weapon, soldier. Doing that will get you killed in an actual, vs. a Hollywood, battle.
I could rant about this all day, but I’ll stop now.
WaterGirl
@salacious crumb: I just saw that. Wow. I’ll bet she’s doing some soul searching.
PurpleGirl
@Villago Delenda Est: Last weekend the Military Channel was showing The Green Berets. One of the clips used had John Wayne in a battle scene saying (paraphrase) “Here due process is a bullet.” I think this sums up the fantasy attitude quite well.
Jay in Oregon
@Todd:
When I first watched Saving Private Ryan, the beginning of the movie—when soldiers were getting cut down by machine gun fire from the beach as the ramps of the landing boats were being lowered—made it clear how much of a bloodbath war was.
R. Porrofatto
Slight correction, the video may take 15 seconds but from when the killer pulls his gun to the time he is lying dead on the sidewalk is only about 7 seconds. The cops had even less time to react.
Seeing how 10 people were shot by police, I’m expecting gun nuts to use this event as a demonstration of why the populace needs to be armed against the government.
Tripod
When that cougar was wandering around the north side of Chicago, CPD fired 50 rounds for one hit.
Cermet
I saw platoon and I know if you run fast enough through the jungle all the enemy soldiers can be picked off like fly’s caught on fly paper and never shoot back or even realize you are after them. Reality would be so easy if it wasn’t corrupted by pesky facts …
The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik
@jp7505a:
@edmund dantes:
@Soonergrunt:
Sadly, I’ve heard the pro-gun rationale to this all: ‘See how awful the police are?! This proves why gubment can’t be trusted with our guns, not only are they evil tyrants, but they can’t shoot as well as us REAL gun users!!’
I shit. you. not. That’s the excuse I heard in all earnestness.
WWStBreitbartD
Police were professional and did not panic because they could not set up a perimeter.
Like they did when they waited 15 minutes for Persecuted Political Prisoner and Social Justice Warrior Steven Hayes to finish with the rich Fatcat 1% Petit family.
quannlace
It won’t affect these people’s fantasies at all. They’;; just think, ‘Those east coast cops don’t know what they’re doing. It would take a real deadeye marksmen like me to take care of the situation”
Jay in Oregon
@quannlace:
It always surprises me how many of those guys weren’t Over There, single-handedly winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan for us.
Oh, wait, I meant “never surprises me”.
RedKitten
@quannlace: Sadlyy, you’re right. These people are completely delusional, and all think that they have the marksmanship skills of Carlos Norman Hathcock II.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@The Snarxist
: Sadly, I’ve heard the pro-gun rationale to this all: ‘See how awful the police are?! This proves why gubment can’t be trusted with our guns, not only are they evil tyrants, but they can’t shoot as well as us REAL gun users!!’These Walter Mitty numb nuts are beyond hope. It’s hard to figure out what’s going just watching the video. I bet it’s safe to say a lot of people who were there still don’t know what happened.
red dog
@salacious crumb: Just the opposite of the guys who protected their girlfriends in Aurora. Just sayin’.
WJS
@Soonergrunt:
I don’t know if anyone has read Dave Grossman or not, but he seems to have a lot of this covered.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Soonergrunt: Firing in to a crowd of panicked civilians is generally considered bad form.
RSA
@R. Porrofatto:
I wonder why gun nuts always fantasize about everyone carrying a gun but never about everyone wearing body armor? Well, no, I don’t really wonder, but I think it’s telling that their response to violence is generally based on aggression rather than, say, personal defense or (horrors) large-scale regulation.
LosGatosCA
“Adding in armed civilians to almost any scenario like this would make it worse, not better.”
You are assuming that the gun nuts think fewer dead and fewer wounded is a ‘better’ outcome. That’s incorrect in my observation. The more dead and wounded the greater the glory for the heroic shooter who finally takes down the perp with a single shot right between the eyes. Fantastically that’s with the last available bullet in the heroic shooters gun and after the perp’s gun has been emptied.
Delusions know no bounds, peak wingnut was a lie, and there are no such things as innocent bystanders, legitimately raped pregnant women, or unjustified force. Just acceptable losses, collateral damage in the war against armed bad guys who need to be taken down by NRA heroes.
It’s scary, but it’s evidently true. In fact, the delusion scales all the way up to launching ‘shock and awe’ in Iraq wasting the lives of thousands of soldiers as well as faceless Mooslims. Fully justified at no cost to the delusional crackpots who fantasize about their enhanced manhood they obtain from these sick, fucking stupid fantasies come true.
WWStBreitbartD
@Soonergrunt:
In this case too
Sheriff’s Deputy Shot Decorated Navy Vet in Her Own Backyard Because She ‘Startled’ Him
Amir Khalid
The cops confronted an armed suspect on a New York City street full of innocent bystanders — nine of whom got hit by their bullets. It’s very fortunate that those nine were not more seriously wounded. I’m wondering if anyone here can comment on whether this was the right way to go about stopping an armed and dangerous man in a public place.
The famous song about the Amadou Diallo shooting refers to “41 Shots”, which was the number reported at the time. As I remember it, two officers emptied 16-round clips at Diallo, a third fired four rounds, and the fourth fired five rounds.
edmund dantes
You ever notice that times when a tazer or other alternative to lethal force are designed for they never use them?
PhoenixRising
Yeah, if tasers were predictable tools for getting compliance from a suspect at close range this would be a perfect setting for their use.
Apparently tasers are tools for torturing people who don’t present an I mediate threat to the officer’s life. Because when confronted with a real threat, they emptied their guns. Not that I’m even critiquing that choice, as every cop I know would do the same thing.
But this really demonstrates why the arguments for “non-lethal” weapons are a bunch of excuses from cops who don’t want to learn a compliance hold and share in the risk with their non-compliant citizen they’ve chosen to confront.
edmund dantes
@PhoenixRising: My point too. This shows the lies of non-lethal force excuses.
The Moar You Know
A cop that would try to use a Taser against a better-armed suspect would be an idiot. A very dead idiot. Tasers were meant for guys with knives, lawn chairs, clubs, stuff like that. Not guns.
JCT
Obviously this could have been much worse and my understanding is that most of the injuries were lower extremity and consistent with ricochets. One guy hit in the arm was directly behind the assailant. I’m not sure that the cops could have done much better — within seconds of being told some guy just gunned down another on a profoundly busy sidewalk (really, the area around the ESB at 9AM is nuts) they are faced with a guy who looks like any other businessman on the street and then he pulls out a .45 on them.
I never cease to be amazed at this “arm everyone” mentality. I target shoot and enjoy it, but the bravado of some of these gun fetishists (and that’s what they are) is pathetic. Oh yes, I am sure that if they were within 10 feet of a guy SUDDENLY pointing a .45 right at them, they would have cooly taken aim and dropped him with a single head or center mass shot.
Right after they finished pissing themselves after they looked down that barrel.
Can’t wait for the next argument at the range over whether you should carry your magical concealed weapon with a bullet in the chamber and the safety off because “just imagine if these cops had to rack their slide first.
/rant off
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@PhoenixRising: @edmund dantes: This.
Tasers make things worse. I’m an advocate of the old fashioned gun and badge. Situations like this aside, 99% of the time, a drawn gun will get compliance, no physical force necessary.
I think the problem with tasers is that because they are supposedly “non-lethal”, police have a tendency to overuse them. That mistake is usually not made with a gun. People don’t hold any illusions about their lethality. Of course, in an ideal world, we wouldn’t need to arm our cops with guns. Sadly, that’s not the world in which we live – or at least not the nation in which we live.
WWStBreitbartD
@JCT:
Also coming from the NYPD and Police unions
This is under investigation and we can not comment.
The officers followed policy.
We will not release any ballistic reports.
This is the fault of the ACLU who had us cut back on Stop and Frisk.
The officers did what they had to make it home alive for dinner with their families.
Ronzoni Rigatoni
Well, I did pretty good on a firing range for 25 years. But IIRC, aren’t there 9 very dead FBI agents armed with handguns who exchanged shots with 2 guys (here in FL) armed with assault rifles? Hand guns are fun on a firing range, but beyond a 2 feet range in a crisis situation, they are useless. I was appalled when the dear US Customs Service (don’t let the name fool ya) actually armed Inspectors in a crowded passenger-screening area.
WWStBreitbartD
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Especially if they are a bully who enjoys using them for compliance if someone is insolence and shows “Contempt of Cop”.
It Took 52 Brave Cops To Kill Him
Larkspur
@red dog: Everyone knows you shouldn’t leave a child in the line of fire, but I cannot swear to you, as I sit here safe at my keyboard, that I would not panic and do the exact same thing. And then spend the rest of my life hating myself. That’s collateral damage in itself.
Amir Khalid
@WWStBreitbartD:
I wonder: under Stop & Frisk, how many 50-something white men in business suits did the NYPD stop and frisk?
Porlock Junior
@Amir Khalid:
Well, in a thread like this, it’s hard to give out awards, but I think this one takes the prize so far.
Porlock Junior
@danah gaz (fka gaz):
Except, of course, when they think they’re pulling out their normal torture weapon but in their excitement they hit the wrong holster and get the lethal weapon.
(Bay Area people will recognize the wonderful alibi of the BART cop who shot a guy lying on the ground. Probably also some news-fans elsewhere.)
? Martin
@salacious crumb: Don’t judge. Lizard brain works differently for all of us.
2AGal
being a gun enthusiast, or the ever popular term on this site, gun nut, i have to say that just about all of the comments are not totally accurate about all firearms owners. i have been shooting for a while now, and have had some training. i wish i could afford more, but, will when i can. most firearms owners do so for self-defense – and certainly don’t believe that everyone needs or should own a firearm. what most of us do believe, is that it is a constitutional right to exercise. on top of self-defense, there is also hunting and shooting sports, along with educational programs for kids and families. are there some gun nuts that boast they could have done better in bringing down the killer? certainly…there are childishly foolish individuals in all walks of life – from liberals to far-right-non-science believing conversatives – there are fools everywhere. frankly, i carry a concealed weapon, and i know that for myself – and those that i know that have been shooting for years – would have backed off and ran for cover first, and then after assessing the situation and saw the police, would have had no reason to draw my weapon. Just like all libs aren’t prone to shoving all people within a group under one insulting category – gun nuts – not all gun enthusiasts are as foolish as your comments depict.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@Porlock Junior: which would seem to support my position that cops should not carry tasers.
JCT
@WWStBreitbartD: Sorry, I’ve lived in NYC for the past 30 years and certainly seen my share of appalling NYPD shoots and overall behavior. But I’m not ready to lump these two officers in with some of those previous events. Very easy to Monday-morning quarterback. And in the end, the only dead men were the original victim and the shooter.
NCSteve
@Amir Khalid:
See, that’s the thing no one, especially wingnuts who think guns are toys and what they see on teevee and moovies are real, but also plenty of gun-hating, war-hating liberals, just don’t get.
When someone pulls a gun and its your job to do something about it, there isn’t a “right way” to deal with it. The reason that notion is misguided comes down to more than just the obvious fact that there isn’t any time to pull out your procedures manual and debate the issue with your partner. Rather, its misguided because in that situation, there’s just you and your gun and the unpredictable and utterly idiosyncratic interaction that’s going to occur between the explosive release of a complex and toxic stew of neurotransmitters and hormones that we call the fight or flight instinct on the one hand and the spinal reflex responses they tried drill into you in training on the other.
And that’s all. Your cerebral cortex is shut completely out of the decision loop. Period. There is no reflection, no decision, no deliberation. It will come back eventually. If you and the bad guy both survive the first few seconds to minutes, most people who haven’t just been rendered useless by sheer terror will get some level of cognitive function back. The ones who get a lot of it back quickly are the ones who live to get the medals. The ones who keep doing the right things without higher cognitive function are usually the ones who get the medals posthumously.
Until that happens, though, there’s just hopefully well-drilled spinal reflexes interacting with a fight or flight response handed down from our piscine ancestors and honed and perfected by another half a billion years of evolution.
If your training is good and you drill on a constant basis, things will probably end better than if your training is shitty or entirely nonexistent, as is the case with the overwhelming majority of swaggering gun nuts with carry permits. But the point of that training is, and has to be, to train your your reflexes to do what the trainers think and hope is most likely to be the best possible response in the largest number of possible situations. By definition, that means there are some few possible situations where they are going have trained your reflexes to do what is situationally the wrong thing. And what can never be adequately anticipated in advance is how those trained reflexes are going to interact with the massive primitive neural blast of hormones and neurotransmitters that we call the fight or flight response.
Gun nutty wingnuts think they live in a fucking movie or a video game. They think shooting at paper targets with their nine millimeter penile extenders or at defenseless animals with high powered rifles or shotguns is “training” that can prepare them for something like this. Way too many liberals think higher cognitive functions can somehow engage when a life-threatening situation appears out of nowhere and that you can think your way through to an optimal solution. And both sides are full of crap.
And that’s why its wrong to second-guess these guys.
jayjaybear
@Tripod: Poor Demi…
Lee
Late to the thread but the cops were 10-15 feet away and STILL MISSED!?!?!
They need better training there is no excuse for that.
gun guy
gosh but you guys like agreeing with yourselves. it’s worth noting that the killer had no problem getting a gun in one of the most restrictive gun rights cities in the nation so that should give you an idea of the effacacy of gun control laws,,,
But had I been there and armed I would have sought cover just like everyone else, armed or not I am not about to interfere with the cops doing their job and I think most licensed carry people feel the same way.
but if the situation had evolved differently, and the killer had taken out the two cops I wouldn’t have been begging for mercy, I would have put him down to protect myself and everyone else there…. and then I would have been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon.
and for those who are interested the general standard for police marksmanship is to unload you weapon at ten feet into the chest as quickly as possible…. which is pretty much what these two officers tried to do and isn’t a hard thing to do.
most shooters at my range have higher standards… bursts of three into a four inch circle at 30 feet.
okay, start the feeding frenzy
whidby
Two police officers fail to put all of their rounds into a target from 7 feet away and, instead, shoot 9 bystanders.
And this is evidence that only the police should be armed?
Pinkamena Panic
@whidby: Tone-deaf much?
whidby
No, I think I understand. You see, if there are lots of “poorly trained” armed civilians with guns who try to intervene, then there is a good chance that bystanders will be shot. That is why we should rely on the highly trained police officers so that things like that don’t happen.
whidby
And here is solid proof of the sort of carnage that results when poorly trained civilians attempt to intervene to stop criminals: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4wcmGUK_-w
TenguPhule
Fuck off. They had less then 15 fucking seconds. This is reality, not Modern Warfare 2.
TenguPhule
We now know from you statements that whidby should definitely never be armed in any circumstances due to sheer trolling dumbfuckery.
Triassic Sands
Once again, conclusive evidence that if only every American were armed all of the time, the bad guys would die instantly and no one else would be hurt.
Soonergrunt
And now the fantasists have arrived, no doubt to lie about how the guy got his gun in New York. He didn’t. He bought it in Florida over a decade ago and didn’t register it when he arrived in the state as he was required to do.
They’ll doubtless gloss over the fact that most of the guns recovered by law enforcement in New York were legally purchased in Virginia and other states primarily south of the Mason Dixon by people who then illegally sold them to people in New York making New York’s laws useless.
They will no doubt claim, with nothing to back them up except their own wild fantasies, that “had I been there, I would’ve put him down with two in the chest and one in the head and then lit up a Marlboro” and other similar nonsense.
We’ll hear about their “constitutional rights” as if the individual right to keep and bear arms ever existed prior to the 1960s and 1970s, because it didn’t. Many states in the union limited or restricted firearms ownership, particularly in the south (that bastion of 2nd Amendment lovers) because it was another way to keep the blacks in their places. Gun control laws went crazy in Oklahoma and other southern states after the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot (which was whites rioting and destroying African American property and neighborhoods, btw.)
It wasn’t until after the African Americans got the federal government to enforce their right to vote and not be discriminated against that suddenly whites and especially southern whites invented an individual right to keep and bear arms out of the 2A’s requirement for “A Well Regulated Militia”.
And I have yet to EVER meet anyone who could keep his head in a gunfight who didn’t train on an weekly if not daily basis.
Pinkamena Panic
Yet another chest-thumping, gun-fellating, I-need-mah-gunz-ta-pertect-me-from-teh-gummintz dimshit. It’s pie time for you.
Nerull
@gun guy: So you can hit a target while calm and collected, with time to prepare. Now do it from holstered position in a few seconds while someone is about to kill you.
Life is not a video game, and that you guys can’t seem to understand this is terrifying.
danah gaz (fka gaz)
@gun guy: oooh! my hero!
Don’t you have a Call of Duty tournament to get to? Go to it, guy – your cheetos are getting stale.
whidby
“And I have yet to EVER meet anyone who could keep his head in a gunfight who didn’t train on an weekly if not daily basis.”
Absolutely right. If anything that is an understatement. I assume that the only reason why the stone-cold killer in this video could accomplish his extraordinary and never-repeateable acts of ninja wizardry is because he trained HOURLY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4wcmGUK_-w
gun guy
@ nerul & dana: no…. like most cops I’ve never had to unholster my weapon and fire it at an individual, but on the other hand, I have disarmed a man armed with a .45 who was trying to kill himself and I have intervened in a mugging when all I had to defend myself was an umbrella… (got a commendation from the police department for that) so yeah, I think when push came to shove I would act, as I have in the past, with a certain amount of clarity and risk my life for the sake of others. Hey, but that’s just me. You might experience life differently.
talabama
@TenguPhule: @TenguPhule: But this is their job, they should be properly trained. This guy shot his former boss and was fleeing the scene. NYPD escalated it to a mass (gang) shooting. Look at video, and notice the cop who moves to the right of the screen is firing one handed. That is poor form. If they are going to carry deadly weapons they need proper and routine force on force training. Last I checked the NYPD qual is shooting paper from a stationary position, and only once a year.
talabama
@TenguPhule: @TenguPhule: But this is their job, they should be properly trained. This guy shot his former boss and was fleeing the scene. NYPD escalated it to a mass (gang) shooting. Look at video, and notice the cop who moves to the right of the screen is firing one handed. That is poor form. If they are going to carry deadly weapons they need proper and routine force on force training. Last I checked the NYPD qual is shooting paper from a stationary position, and only once a year.
LanceThruster
@Jay in Oregon:
Absolutely. The entire D-day scene, for that matter. The soldier whose arm had been blown off and stumbled in a daze to pick the arm up. Hitting my thumb with a hammer would put me in that sort of haze.
I remember a graphic description by a WWII fighter pilot who thought there was a piece of shrapnel in the back of his hand, and when he went to pull it out with his teeth, realized it was his (still connected) bone.
Armchair warriors are the feircest motherfvckers on the planet…as long as it’s someone else’s blood and guts.
BruinKid
@YellowJournalism: Don’t know if this is on your computers as well, but the ad on this page right now features the game show “Press Your Luck”.
dance around in your bones
@gun guy:
You know, I have only had to call 911 once in my life (when a very drunk neighbor was beating on my door) but gawdamn was I glad for the police presence) – especially when totally drunk dude tried to get back into his car and drive away..
I yelled to the cops “Don’t let that guy get into that car, he is as drunk as a skunk!” and they kept him from driving away.
Nobody got shot or killed. I was VERY grateful for the police presence that night, which has not always been my….sentiment.
I just say, thank gawd for you guys when we need you.
dance around in your bones
Ok, I just remembered that I had to call 911 once before – my kid was about 9 or 10? and came into our room in the middle of the night and said “There’s a naked lady on our back porch”…
Well naturally we didn’t believe it and thought it was a bad dream until I looked on the back porch…and by gawd, there WAS a naked lady on the back porch.
She had apparently run away from some abusive situation and tried to swim across the lake between our house and her apartment (carrying a 6-pack under her arm) and showed up on our porch covered with mud and lake type plants.
When I called the police, they said “We think we know who this woman is….let us call you back after we check it out”.
They called back within 10 minutes and were at our house within ten more.
I gave naked lady some clothes to wear and she said “I’ll bring them back” I said….OH! no problem. Just keep them!
The police had to make a decision about where to take naked lady….to the hospital? to a mental institution? to a women’s shelter? It was not her first interaction with the police – I got a sense of the difficulties of police work right then – they often to have to deal with the mentally ill that our “health system” does not provide for (Thanks, Ronald R.)
I just want to say that things are not always cut and dried for the cops anymore than they are for regular citizens…..while also expressing my complete empathy for the innocent bystanders who were hurt because of the actions of a deranged guy who was probably stressed because of losing his job.
I think this kind of thing has become more prevalent since the economic meltdown, kinda like bankers jumping off ledges back in the day when they had some sense of shame. Only nowadays people are just shooting other people.
I am rambling, I guess.
Larkspur
@dance around in your bones: As rambles go, a pretty good one. I’ve had very few encounters with the police, one exception being a police officer who resided in a neighboring apartment. He had one hellacious cop party one Saturday night. I heard the noise but only later heard about the peeing off the balcony. The rest of us were all, “Umm, who do we call?” But of course these things always have consequences, and there was a short investigation, a round of formal apologies, and undoubtedly some departmental discipline. This concludes my ramble.
Paul in KY
@edmund dantes: You don’t take a tazer to a gun fight. The perp did point a .45 at them, after he had just blown away another person.