Weapons Discipline Was Lacking In Watertown
BY Herschel Smith
9 years, 7 months ago
A newly released report by local authorities details the response of law enforcement following the Boston Marathon bombings.
The full report is available here.
The report says that during the early morning shootout in Watertown on Friday, April 19, 2013, the first officers to arrive “practiced appropriate weapons discipline while they were engaged in the firefight with the suspects.” But it added that “additional officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons.”
After the firefight, one officer fired upon plain-clothes officers in an unmarked Massachusetts State Police vehicle that was wrongly reported as stolen, according to the report, which also cites lack of weapons discipline by law enforcement during efforts to apprehend Dzhokhar Tsarnaev when he was hiding in a boat behind a Watertown home.
Via WRSA, WeaponsMan also has an analysis of the report. But focus for a moment on these takeaways from the report. First, “officers arriving on scene near the conclusion of the firefight fired weapons toward the vicinity of the suspects, without necessarily having identified and lined up their target or appropriately aimed their weapons.” This is very serious, with LEOs shooting wildly at nothing and everything, innocent victims in danger of being shot, and LEOs held completely guiltless in the lack of discipline, even if they had killed someone.
Second, the officer who shot at the vehicle violated Tennessee versus Garner in that he didn’t make the shot in self defense. If you or I did someone like that we would be in prison today. And the sadly ignorant, “sheeple” public trusts the LEOs and fears peaceable concealed or open carriers. It just boggles the mind, honestly.
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On April 6, 2015 at 7:44 am, Lina Inverse said:
My understanding of Tennessee v. Garner is well summarized by Wikipedia’s introduction to the case, that “when a law enforcement officer is pursuing a fleeing suspect, he or she may not use deadly force to prevent escape unless the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.”
That allows, for example, using lethal force on a knife wielding crazy who you evade but who appears to be continuing his rampage. Since they didn’t have knowledge of the injuries the younger brother took in the Watertown Charlie Foxtrot I think it would be hard to make a case the officers wouldn’t reasonably think he continued to “pose a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to others.”
The two things I found most interesting in the WeaponsMan analysis was the focus on contagion, which has resulted in many civilian injuries and deaths, from SWAT teams shooting for no greater reason than a loud noise another team maker made (I’m thinking of the hunt for the stolen game console) to the theories that many if not most if not all of the ATF deaths at Waco were own goals, and the “firefight” started with a ND from one of them on a ladder followed by contagion.
And how, instead of responding to a call for mutual aid and being part of a command structure, the latter, I’ll note, being required for lawful combatants in warfare, a whole bunch of these SWAT types just showed up and did their own thing. One is justified in wondering, like one commentator did, if some didn’t go for the opportunity to kill someone. I add that killing dogs must get boring after a while.