This happened back in February 2006. In a nutshell, some kids skipped out on their check at an IHOP, and as they were driving away, an off-duty police officer moonlighting as a security guard shot at the car, killing Aaron Brown, 19, because the cop felt the driver of the car was trying to hit him.
The thread went on for like 15 pages, so I am starting a new thread to update. From today’s Washington Post (full article here,):
He is being suspended for “violating police policies on handling moving vehicles” and that he “unreasonably placed himself in a position that allowed the situation to elevate to a level of high risk.”
His opinion is biased, your opinion doesn’t count and the prosecutor had nothing to say about how well or not he did his job-- only whether or not his actions were criminal.
With respect to your third item, that’s bullshit, of course. The prosecutor’s opinion was only that he didn’t do anything that merited indictment. The prosecutor’s decision not to press charges doesn’t mean the prosecutor thinks he did a good job. There’s no law against “doing a bad job.”
With respect to your second item, well of course HE doesn’t think so. If employees were only suspended or fired when they themselves thought they did a bad job, nobody would ever be suspended or fired.
Which leaves your first item as really the only meaningful part of your post. And who gives a shit?
And probably not in the opinion of some random guy playing video games in Gdansk. And you all share something else in common. Your opinion doesn’t count. However, the opinion of his supervisor is another matter.
I have to stick up for garfield’s criticism of the police chief. Not because he’s right, god help us, but in the interest of reserving the right to do so myself at some point in the future.
Isn’t the first time, most certainly won’t be the last. shrug Some of the opinions in the other thread were bags of shit too – like saying the cop had to kill someone to satisfy his macho ego. For example.
The morale in that police department must be in the basement. Nothing sucks more than to know your chief will hang you out to dry when you make a judgement call. From what I can glean about the P.D. policies from the article, they are written vaguely - which is not uncommon, unfortunately. That chief should be suspended for having a piss-poor policy and failing to properly train his subordinates.
How, in your opinion, was an officer justified for deliberately jumping in front of a moving vehicle and firing at it in an attempt to stop it and killing a kid in response to a dine `n dash?
It doesn’t look like he got suspended for the shooting. When he was in the situation where he started shooting, discharging the firearm was an appropriate (proceduarally) response. It wasn’t a criminal response, either.
What he’s getting suspended for is putting himself in front of the car, creating a situation where his discharge was (procedurally) warranted, when there were other options he could have taken.
I’m expressing no opinion of the rightness or wrongness of his actions on a moral level, solely pointing aout that nothing he did was criminal, and his procedural error was escalating a situation in violation of procedure.
Outside of the debate about the morality of his actions, the suspension was warranted.