Let me see — last time I called in a crime in progress it was a man chasing a woman down with a drawn handgun. I didn’t know the man or the woman, but I did meet the man some months later and he asked for a good-neighbor-referral. Would I call again on that? Damn straight! Turns out that the man’s brother was negligently shot and the brother’s girlfriend wanted to take him to the hospital, but the man with the gun did not. Police took good care of that and nobody got hurt. God they were there so quick to get there!

Time before that: I called police because people were trying to break into my apartment (while I was in it). In that situation calling the police turned out to be a big mistake.

Bottom line: you are overgeneralizing.

[Balko] said he would be satisfied with marijuana remaining illegal if policing it involved “a less literal war on drugs.”

Is this true? Would you find that satisfactory?

I know where you’re coming from with that, but it’s bad advice.

NEVER CALL THE COPS. Even if you see a crime in progress. That’s what insurance is for.

But go ahead, call the cops if you want, it’s a free country.

;-)

Isn’t it time we ended this sad experiment?

These “teachers” are fractions of human beings.

One kilopardon for the monster blockquote.

Being Totally Qualified To Carry A Weapon…

I work at an Army Base in MD and today a deer was hit in the road right outside my office window. Cops show up, we can see the deer twitching on the ground behind a tree. We went back to our desks and, a minute later, we heard a gunshot (like 100 ft from my building) and immediately after heard someone yell “You missed! God you suck!” We all run to the window and the deer’s still twitching and the cops are laughing.

I have no way of knowing whether the shooter perhaps felt a moment of remorse and just couldn’t do it but there was no more shots fired. At any rate, this cop couldn’t his the deer that he was standing right on top of.

It makes me wonder how they’ve ever managed to hit even one puppy…

I don’t think its a training issue at all its a culture issue. All the training in the world isn’t going to overcome the police culture of never retreat or admit you were wrong. You said it yourself, the sensible thing would be to hop back over the fence and laugh about how the dog scared the crap out of you excpet that in police culture you can’t admit to having fear. Almost every polcie abuse story Radley or anyone else reports on you can find the underlying cause of arrogance and pride. It is their insuffereable arrogance that makes them act the way they do. This can’t be reformed either.

“You knew it was a snake when you picked it up.”

No, the WORST part of that story is this: “(Taylor’s) defense at trial seemed ironclad: he’d been [locked up] before the crime took place & [wasn't released] until after it took place.” And 12 scumbucket jurors STILL decided he was guilty, even though there was _no possible way he could have done it_, probably because they wanted to get home in time to catch DWTS or something. Fuck ‘em all. Fuck the Chicago PD, fuck the Cook Cty legal system (LOL). Fuck the Midwest, for that matter.

Am *really* looking forward to Chicago looking like Detroit in 40 years or so: mile after mile of abandoned derelict homes and businesses, rotting away while the (straight-ticket democrat) city/county government picks over the carcass looking for that one last chunk of graft to score, like the carrion-eating maggots they are.

Dan Kirk, chief of staff for Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez, said prosecutors were cooperating with the attorney general’s office. He said they were studying the case file as quickly as possible to determine if prosecutors had an obligation to turn over the documents and whether they were withheld.
Sally Daly, Alvarez’s spokeswoman, put a finer point on the issue, saying the office considers the claim “an unsubstantiated allegation.”

It’s obviously an open and shut case against somebody.

Now, call me naive, but having been confronted with exactly similar situations many times in my life it seems to me that the appropriate response at that time would be to either:

a.) Hop back over the fence and have a laugh with your buddy about how the dog scared the crap out of you.

b.) Use your “authority voice” to command the dog to stop and give the dog a chance to get to know you. Then use calming phrases like “nice doggy, please don’t bite me…” to gain his trust and hen make your escape. (option ‘b’ normally being used when you don’t have a handy fence or open door close by to make your escape)

Once again, the notion of strategic retreat is not in the police playbook. But since I was able to handle these situations in elementary school when I might have actually been outweighed by the dog – without having a gun handy, and since most everyone I ever met also managed to escape similar circumstances without a gun, you’d think that just living an ordinary life would give you the tools you need to handle an angry dog without resorting to your firearm.

This has to be a training issue…. but not in the “police lack training in handling dogs” sense, rather in the “police are trained to shoot the dog under these conditions” sense. Normal people just don’t shoot dogs that bark at them, even if they have a gun on their hip.

I mean, call the owner if you know who it is, or call the property manager if you know who it is, but cops are precisely for the situation where someone is stealing copper in a neighborhood that could go either way. That is a situation where the cops can help.

A year a go they ran thru my backyard to find the guy stealing metal and cub scout manuals and other assorted odds and ends from the nearby Church. I took video from my window because I was sure they were going to shoot my backyard neighbors dog Lucy. Fortunately they figured out that the burglar was hiding on the property next door to Lucy’s and so they went in that yard instead of Lucy’s. It was weird videoing and waiting to hear the gunshot as the officer paused to size up Lucy over the low fence. But, thats when somebody yelled, “he’s in that garage!” and the crisis was averted. I think the owner was trying to get Lucy in while this was happening, but she didn’t get him in until the policeman who was thinking about dealing with Lucy was gone. These things happen so quickly. You really have to have a sort of discipline to grab the camera and work it.

Removing the newspaper coverage filter: The dogs, following the suspect, were fleeing. The police, somehow feeling threatened by their running away, shot at them. Being Totally Qualified To Carry A Weapon (TM), one of the cops shot another of the cops.

Radley, I know you had commented only briefly on the Trayvon Martin case, but perhaps a unique perspective you can offer is the comparison to how Zimmerman was treated to just how absurdly easy/likely it is for the police to arrest you based on broad interpretations of the law or questionable evidence, and then pull out all the stops of an investigation including aggressive interrogations. It’d be nice if the peopel defending the police with rosy versions of these events were describing something even close to the actual, widespread thought process of police before an arrest.