This is beyond incredible. Cops had been at this house for quite awhile and even took suspects into custody. Then this cop gets shot? Didn’t the other cop notice the blue uniform?
It makes me seriously wonder about training and the shoot first mentality we’re seeing from cops today.
This wasn’t a chaotic scene at all. The suspects had been arrested. The cops were just finishing up when this cop in another yard fires on a cop standing guard? The whole house is surrounded by cops and this idiot fires at one of them?
At night, in someone else’s yard, through a fence…probably not. Sounds to me like all he saw was someone with a gun that wasn’t stopping or dropping his weapon when being told to (he likely thought the commands were being yelled at someone else).
I’m not (necessarily) defending the cop that did the shooting, but it seems like you may have missed some of the details.
I’d understand better if the shooting happened when the cops were rushing the house. Lots of confusion with people running with guns.
But this was a secured scene. Everyone reasonably calm. Suspects arrested. Why this one cop was in another yard makes no sense. It sounds like he wasn’t aware of what the other cops were doing. Definitely a major screw up in communication.
WAG: He was checking out the neighbor’s yard for some reason or maybe even saw something that made him draw his weapon and when he heard “STOP, DROP YOUR WEAPON” he thought the scene became active again, not realizing the shouting was directed at him. When he scrambled to find cover (which may have been back towards his cop buddies) they mistook that as a threat when they saw someone with a gun.
Another, similar, scenario: He was milling around in the neighbor’s yard for some reason. Cop sees the shadow through the fence, yells at him to stop. Davies hears this and draws his weapon thinking something is happening again. When he draws his weapon the other cop fires at him.
If we take the article at face value, the miscommunication seems to be that a cop didn’t recognize him as a fellow officer, yelled at him and Davies thought that the cop was yelling at someone else so he didn’t respond to it. All the cop saw was an armed person not responding to commands at the scene of a shooting.
It may well be that the scene being calm was one of the contributing factors. Cops are trained to make decisions when everything is rushed and scary, and in those circumstances, Davies would have double-checked who the other officer was yelling at. Thinking the scene was under control, he must have assumed that everyone knew where and who he was.
Barring some later evidence of gross negligence (under the influence) or intention (corruption, malice aforethought), this seems to be tragic human error. I hope everyone involved gets extensive counseling, and future training includes this as an example of what goes wrong.
I think there’s a fundamental problem in police training. Police have been trained for years now on what’s essentially a “zero risk” principle. They’re told to take no chances and to shoot if they feel there’s any possible threat.
Now I don’t want to see any police officers being killed in the line of duty. But there have been a lot of people who have been shot when there was no actual threat because a police officer perceived a possible threat.
I think we need to consider redrawing the line on where a shooting is justified. Police officers have to stop acting like a hypothetical threat is equivalent to an actual threat.
We have a duty to protect and support our police officers. But we also have a duty to protect and support civilians.
I was trained as a hunter to never take a shot unless I confirmed my target. Those leaves rustling may be some guy taking a dump. Or that fleeting glimpse of a deer may be a guy dragging it out of the woods. Hunter safety classes always show a film called Shoot or Not Shoot. That shows all kinds of cases where you can’t take a shot.
I know the rules may be different for cops. They are dealing with targets that shoot back. It just makes me cringe to read that the officer took a shot at such a poorly illuminated target.
It’s a tragedy for the dead cop and the one that pulled the trigger too.
Is that really the case though? I’d be curious how many people are shot that truly weren’t a threat* compared to how many people are shot that truly are a threat.
The problem is, when a cop shoots another cop or when a swat team breaks into the wrong house and kills grandma or when the DEA breaks down the door or the local stoner who’s baked out of his brain and shoots the dog three times we hear about it all over the news for a week. But when the cop pulls out his gun and shoots the guy he pulled over before that guy can grab the gun from under his seat because the cop saw the S&W engraved on a piece of metal we don’t hear about it or at least it’s not as big of a deal.
*“not a threat” is going to be tough though. Is a senile old man in a wheelchair wielding a fork a threat if you can’t get him away from you? Is an unidentified man with a gun that’s not responding to commands to put his gun down that later turns out to be a cop a threat? Is a kid with a walkman a threat?
But if the police officer ‘perceived’ a threat, who are we to tell them they were wrong? We weren’t there. If they were right, we wouldn’t even be talking about this. The difference between COP KILLS MAN HOLDING CELLPHONE and TWO COPS KILLED ONE INJURED ON SOUTH SIDE (Injured cop says he thought shooter was holding a cell phone as he walked out of the 7-11) is just the blink of an eye.
(This is getting kind of rambly and I’m not entirely sure where I was going with it)
ETA all in all, I’m going to go with this being a really crappy accident and there really wasn’t anything that could be done about it. There was no reason for Davies to know he was being yelled and he had every reason to think he needed to be on the defense when he heard commands being issued.
The only learning lesson I can see being taken away from this is that maybe in these situations the cops should be wearing reflective vests. I know they have them, a lot of them wear them at night when they pull people over. If they’re going to be moving around in a crime scene in the dark, it might not be a bad idea to have them on. The only issue it creates is that if there is a shooter out there, they’re easier to spot. But they’re already a big gang of cops, they’re not going to be that hard to pick off if someone really wants to hit one of them.
Keep in mind I worked twenty-seven years in prisons. I’m not somebody who’s going to sympathize with the crooks and condemn the cops. I’m firmly on the side of the police.
But I’ve heard way too many stories about the police shooting the wrong person to think they’re just isolated incidents. At some point, you’ve got to admit there’s a pattern at work. And the pattern seems to be police officers shooting at people who might be a threat instead of just people who are a threat.
Like I said, I sympathize. I understand the split-second pressures the police are working under and I understand the risk of waiting to see if a potential threat becomes a real threat. But the cost of treating every potential threat as a real threat is that some of those potential threats weren’t real threats. And we need to ask how many non-threats were willing to accept being shot as the price for defending against real threats.
Keep in mind that a policy that was supposed to protect police officers was what got Police Officer James Davies killed.