Archive for the 'Police' Category

WNCN.com:

LINCOLNTON, N.C. (WBTV) — An 11-year-old is in stable condition after she was accidentally shot by her mother, a Lincoln County sheriff’s deputy.

Misty Michelle Flowers, a Lincoln County deputy, was reportedly showing her service weapon to guests at her Loop Road home when she accidentally fired the gun. The bullet went through a wall and hit her daughter in the next room, according to reports.

Lincoln deputies said they were called to the home at 11:23 p.m. and started tending to the girl’s injury. The child was taken to CHS-Lincoln and then airlifted to Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte. According to deputies, she was in stable condition after surgery.

Flowers, 38, has been with the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office since 2015 and worked for the Catawba County Sheriff’s Office before that.

She didn’t accidentally do anything.  She negligently placed her finger inside the trigger guard and pulled the trigger.

But remember boys and girls, only a law enforcement officer really knows anything about guns.  And only a law enforcement officer can be trusted to carry one on a day to day basis.  And only law enforcement offices have been trained in super secret ninja warrior stress management techniques while operating tactically during tactical operations.

News from Cleveland:

CUYAHOGA FALLS, Ohio – Investigators are trying to determine if any laws were broken when a stray bullet from the gun of an off-duty police officer ended up inside a local day care center.

The incident happened at about 3:30 Monday afternoon when there were children at the center.

“The person was, I believe in their upstairs bedroom when the gun discharged and it went through their exterior wall and then entered into the day care center,” said Russ Balthis, Cuyahoga Falls city prosecutor.

The gun described by police was a 9mm Glock 19.

“My building is brick and the kids were playing and literally it sounded like a loud noise; dust was flying because it came through one wall and then hit another wall and there’s a circle, so it could still be in the circle but I didn’t want to pull anything apart and look for it,” a caller from the KinderCare Learning Center on State Road told police in a 9-1-1 call.

Police Chief Jack Davis said the gun owner is a volunteer reserve police officer in Cuyahoga Falls but a paid patrolman in East Cleveland, where he has been with their department since last December.

“There was an off-duty East Cleveland officer who was unloading a gun or somehow doing something with his weapon, I believe unloading it, from what I heard, had an accidental discharge the bullet, traveled outside of his home through a wall at a day care and got lodged in the opposite wall of the day care,” said Davis.

Okay, let me help you a bit Mr. Davis.  The officer put his finger inside the trigger guard and pulled the trigger.  I’m glad I could be of help.

Barney, give me the gun and bullet.  Hand it over.

News from Virginia:

It was late on a Saturday night, and Elena DeRosa and her husband were watching TV in their southwest Roanoke County home. Suddenly their dog was going nuts. Seconds later the doorbell rang, and there was loud pounding on their front door — boom, boom, boom.

Because nobody they know ever uses that entrance, the couple feared they were targets of a home-invasion robbery. They’d read about one of those in Roanoke County just the week before, she said.

So DeRosa and her husband (whom she asked me not to name) went for their handguns. He was out the side door, armed, before she got to her gun. As she grabbed it, a bright light beamed into their sunroom.

Then the shouting began, DeRosa said. Someone ordered her out of the house. The light was in her face. The next day, this is what she wrote on her blog, in a post titled “My Life Matters.”

“Whoever it is, they are not lowering the light so I look away from it and see my husband to my left staring down the barrel of a gun while a cop shouts to him to put his hands on his head. WTF? The light gets lowered as I’m being yelled at to step out of the house, and for the first time I see cops, many, many cops all over my yard, guns pointed at me and my husband.

“I quickly put my [handgun] on the shelf inside and step out to the shouting, ‘Put your hands on top of your head, hands on the head!’ while three of them advance on me, their guns drawn and pointed.”

Geniuses, each and every one.  I reckon no one has ever heard of independent verification or QV&V (quality verification and validation to ensure the accuracy, fidelity and veracity of your information).  Guns drawn, people muzzle flagged, and innocent people put at risk, and had there been a home invasion by gang bangers, the poor folks inside wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.  Oh well, Justice Breyer says we don’t have a right to self defense anyway, because, “the children.”

Remember, boys and girls.  Only cops can commit the crime of home invasion, because they are just like you, only better and more special.  It’s illegal for you to do this.

Statesman:

Continuing his efforts to champion law enforcement since five Dallas officers were shot to death in July, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick announced Wednesday that he will press legislators to provide all 59,000 Texas patrol officers with a bulletproof vest capable of stopping high-caliber rifle rounds.

Early estimates place the cost at $15 million to $20 million, Patrick said, vowing to fight for the money in the 2017 legislative session despite a tight budget thanks to depressed oil and gas prices.

Oh my.  Do you think he understands that he’s talking about sending every cop out every day with hard shell SAPI plates and tactical vest plate carriers?  Wouldn’t that be a sight in Texas heat?  Sort of like it was with Marines running around Fallujah in 120 degree weather with full body armor on.  We’d have officers passing out everywhere, unable to get into and out of their patrol vehicles, knees crumbling from the stress, and unable to pass the physical with the additional weight of the vests.

Do you think someone needs to talk to him in private?  Or perhaps not.  Let’s see how this little experiment goes, shall we?  Everyone in favor, say aye?

News from California:

A gang member used armor piercing-bullets and an AR-15 to kill two Palm Springs police officers in a planned “ambush” on Saturday, said Riverside County District Attorney Mike Hestrin in a press conference Wednesday.

John Felix, 26, shot an assault rifle through the front door of his house, killing Officers Jose “Gil” Vega and Lesley Zerebny and wounding a third officer – all of whom were wearing bulletproof vests. Felix was captured early Sunday morning after a 12-hour standoff with police and SWAT teams.

Felix has been charged with two counts of first-degree murder and three counts of attempted murder, with enhancement filed on each charge for the use of body armor and armor-piercing bullets.

Because most journalists write at the fifth grade level (intentionally and by design), we don’t know what this means.  I suppose it means that he used green tip ammunition.

But it really doesn’t matter.  I’ll wager that the cops were using SAPI plates, and so Kevlar won’t stop either green tip or frangible 5.56 mm ammunition.  But leave it to the police to make it sound like something other than what it is.  Someone killed cops.  The ammunition he used is irrelevant, and the cops know that.  This event was used to make an unrelated point.

And what’s the issue with the use of “body armor?”  What was he wearing – Kevlar or hard shell armor?  Is that illegal in California?

Reason:

A Hennepin County (Minn.) drug squad — known as the Emergency Services Unit (ESU) — conducted a pre-dawn no-knock raid on a house in North Minneapolis one morning in November 2015. They were looking for Walter Power, who they suspected of being a marijuana dealer. To search the home they believed Power to be sleeping in, they brought a force of between 28-32 officers, most clad in riot gear and carrying rifles, accompanied by a sniper seated atop a Ballistic Engineered Armored Response (BEAR) vehicle.

Why did law enforcement officials feel they needed to display a show of overwhelming force that would be intense even in a foreign occupied city? Because the primary resident of the house, Michael Delgado, was a registered gun-owner with a license to carry.

Convinced of the potential danger posed to officers when raiding a house with an armed occupant, Hennepin County District Judge Tanya Bransford signed off on the no-knock raid, but later told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that she did not know a platoon of up to 32 officers would be deployed to search the house, or that they’d throw flash bang grenades through the windows in addition to knocking down doors.

The raid resulted in the arrest of Power — the suspected marijuana dealer — for “fifth-degree drug possession,” the lowest possible drug charges on the books. Even this modest charge would be dropped after Judge Bransford declared the raid unconstitutional in a ruling last summer, arguing that Delgado and Power had been subject to unreasonable search and seizure in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Bransford wrote in her ruling “that the types of militarized actions used in this case seem to be a matter of customary business practice,” which she found troubling.

Like most of the U.S., Hennepin County has increasingly relied on SWAT teams to serve warrants. According to the Star-Tribune, its ESU deployed 71 times last year, which is more than double its annual usage from a decade prior. A 2014 study by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) found that on a national basis, SWAT teams were only used “for hostage, barricade, or active shooter scenarios” in seven percent of all deployments, while 62 percent of SWAT raids were to search for drugs.

The executive director of the Minnesota Sheriff’s Association, Jim Franklin, was quoted by the Star-Tribune as saying of Bransford’s ruling, “My question to her is: Are you going to attend the dead cop’s funeral?” Franklin’s argument is essentially that without the use of such violent and destructive tactics, officers’ lives would be at risk.

Why didn’t uniformed officers go up to the door in the day time and knock?  Oh yea.  They wanted that “evidence.”  Okay, so why didn’t they stake out the home and wait until he left, go into the home to get their evidence, and then arrest him in the driveway?

Because they wanted to be all tacticool and bad ass.  They wanted to play soldier-boy without the commitment.  As for the judge, she knew.  She knew everything.  She’s throwing a red herring in your face now because it looks bad.  She could have asked the same questions I’m asking.  It makes no difference whether they used 30 officers or three.  They conducted an armed invasion of another man’s home and are at a minimum guilty of breaking and entering, as well as reckless endangerment.

Jim Franklin is also lying.  If he was concerned about officer safety, he wouldn’t be advocating these kinds of ridiculous raids to begin with.  He would be advocating exactly what I did, i.e., stake the home out and arrest him in the driveway.

Both judge Bransford and Jim Franklin are liars.

Daily Herald:

The Chicago Police Department for the first time will ask the public to comment on proposed changes in how officers may use force against people suspected of crimes — proposals that already are worrying some officers, such as restrictions on when to draw a weapon.

Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson has sent a memo to officers giving them highlights of the changes.

Among the most controversial proposals among the rank-and-file is for officers to keep their guns in their holsters “unless there is a reasonable belief that such action is necessary for the officer’s safety or the safety of others,” several officers told the Chicago Sun-Times on Friday.

One sergeant said he was worried the restriction could prompt officers to second-guess themselves in potentially dangerous situations in which they might have drawn their guns in the past.

I would have thought that this would have been fairly uncontroversial, but then again I guess I just have an exaggerated sense of equity and fairness.  If I can’t do it, and I expect that others can’t unholster their weapons towards me, then cops shouldn’t be able to do it either.  And there is that whole Tennessee versus Garner thing.

Bearing Arms:

Around 3 a.m. Wednesday, 73-year-old Abraham Venson woke up to an alarm company alerting him to someone breaking into his shed, the same shed that had been broken into months ago.

Venson went outside his home with a gun in hand. As the two robbers ran from his home, Venson saw the second man reach for his waistband. That’s when Venson fired his weapon, striking the man.

Although someone was breaking into his shed, Venson was arrested for the shooting. Under Louisiana law, it is unlawful for you to fire a weapon at someone if  your life is not at risk. It doesn’t matter if they’re stealing personal property or not.

[ … ]

“Jail ain’t no place for anybody,” said neighbor Alvin Campbell, who feels the arrest against Venson was unjust.

If this report is accurate, [a] I don’t see the problem, and [b] Bob’s analysis is incomplete and perhaps flat wrong.  Sure, it may have been wiser for him not to have followed the robber.  That’s water over the dam at this point.

The way I read the report, he didn’t shoot at the robber for his crime of larceny.  He shot because he feared for his life.  This is his defense, and any good lawyer would set it up that way.

But I suspect the problem here runs deeper.  I suspect that he talked to the police and said something inaccurate or damning, and thus the prosecutor has charged him with a crime, whether his report to the police was accurate or not.

Folks, do not ever talk to the police.  Ever.  His first action should have been to call 911 and tell the dispatcher that a shooting had occurred.  The second should have been to tell the police that they can talk to his lawyer and he has nothing to say.

Please … please … learn this.  Please.  And watch this video one more time for good measure.

Via Daily Caller, KHOU:

HOUSTON- A good Samaritan with a gun stopped three suspects whom held Auto Zone employees at gunpoint during an attempted robbery on Friday night.

According to authorities, three males entered the Auto Zone on Jones Road around 9:00 p.m. demanding cash from the register. A customer who happened to be pulling up saw the men holding the employees at gunpoint.

The customer, a “LTC” permit carrier, pulled his gun and went inside the store. He made the suspects get down on the ground and drop their weapons.

Deputies said he held the suspects until they arrived. All three suspects were arrested.

Wait!  Ridiculous and impossible.  When anyone other than a trained law enforcement officer (all of whom are experts in super secret ninja warrior stress management techniques and operating tactically during tactical operations) tries to stop crime or engage in self defense or defense of others, guns take on a life of their own and rotate as if a windmill, firing uncontrollably and randomly, killing innocent women and children everywhere.  How could this happen?

But there is more.

Although deputies commended the customer for his actions, they don’t recommend this because they say it could have ended in a shootout and someone getting hurt.

Of course.  Could this have ended any other way than law enforcement telling others not to do this sort of thing and to leave it to the “experts?”

News from Wisconsin:

A cased rifle belonging to an officer with the Madison Police Department has been returned.

Officials say on Thursday the officer placed the gun on the back of his squad car, which he was about to drive from a MPD parking garage on Fairchild Street to the nearby City County Building.

The officer inadvertently forgot to move the cased weapon back into the squad, and it fell off into the roadway in the 200 block of South Hamilton Street. Realizing what had happened, the officer immediately went back to retrieve the case, only to find someone had picked it up.

According to police, on Friday the person who found the weapon was located.

Gosh, I hate it when that happens to me.  I simply cannot tell you the number of guns I’ve lost by sitting them on the trunk of the car and driving off.

Fortunately for him, they were apparently found by a law abiding citizen.  On the other hand, what’s the loss if not?  The taxpayers foot the bill for everything.  It’s not like it doesn’t happen to LEOs everywhere, right?