He fucking SWERVED when the cop started shooting at him, asshat. RTFA or STFU.
If he was about to run over the cop, why would he swerve? That just gives the cop more chances to shoot at him. If the cop was about to be killed, the driver would have killed him, regardless of whether the cop pulled out his gun.
And I don’t buy the “blocked by parked cars” crap. See, a human being can walk between parked cars, a speeding murderous automobile can’t. If the cop was surrounded by parked cars all he had to do was walk between two parked cars there’s no way he was in any danger of being run over.
And even if the driver was attempting to murder the cop, the cop hit the wrong guy. He killed a fucking innocent bystander who was a passenger. Or are all people in the car equally as guilty as the driver? If a cop pulls you over for speeding, does he also give tickets to the passengers?
The cop killed a person who was posing no danger to him. Firing a gun into a moving vehicle doesn’t protect the cop and it puts lives at risk, even discounting the risk to the driver.
Lemur hits it out of the park on this last pitch. Good show.
See, here is where your logic breaks down. Your whole self defense argument is based on the assumption that the cop couldn’t get out of the way, he was hemmed in, and about to die. But, somehow, in this teeny-tiny parking lot that offered no escape to the cop, the approaching car has room to swerve away? If there is room for the car to swerve, there is room for the cop to get out of the way. The cop lost his cool, tried to murder some pancake thieves, and now he is going to pay for it. Not fully, as he will only get a slap on the wrist, and the pancake thief is still dead, but enough to vindicate all of us who correctly determined he was in the wrong. Oh, and GFYWARC.
Believe it or not, we have already had a whole thread about this. Seeing as how you’ve apparently not read it, I’ll just start copying my replies to your already-covered points from there.
NOTE: The chief says he indeed did not follow the policy. I disagree with the chief, and therefore don’t find the cop at fault. This is, as was pointed out to me (repetedly) upthread, my opinion only. Obviously.
If the cop had shot and killed the driver of the car, then maybe we could talk. But he didn’t shoot the driver, he shot a passenger. No matter what the driver’s intent, the passengers didn’t try to run down the cop, they weren’t driving the car.
It happens all the time that psycho drivers have innocent people in their cars…their kids in the backseat, a kidnap victim, their buddies who didn’t know the driver was gonna go psycho. Which is why shooting into a moving vehicle is unjustified, even to stop a psycho driver.
A few years ago there was a nearly identical incident in LA (I think) that was caught on tape. In that particular case, IMO the cop unquestionably killed a man that he didn’t need to.
In that case the car was in a parking lot and moving about 2 miles an hour. The cop walked into the car’s path and ordered the driver to stop. The car was moving so slowly the cop was able to keep pace, waking backward, to stay in front of the car with with his gun aimed at the driver. When the cop glanced behind and saw he was slowly being backed toward a fence, and he might get caught between the car and fence, he opened fire and killed the driver. He had more than enough time to step out of the way. He probably made that vehicle MORE dangerous to himself, as a spasming dying man could easily have stomped on the gas.
But for all we know, these kids could have been accelerating at maximum speed and the cop had only a moment to decide.
And since I can imagine scenarios where “blame” could be placed on either side, I won’t even state an opinion on this, except to say it was certainly in the chief’s purview to make a call and suspend the cop. Not even fire him – this is essentially a slap on the wrist.
I never did hear what happened to the cop several years ago.
The prosecutor’s report, IIRC, says how fast the van was likely moving. I don’t remember the figure, but I think it was something like between 25 and 35 MPH. One witness who was in the parking lot estimated it at something like 40 MPH, while one of the passengers said it was too fast for a parking lot, but not too fast for a residential street.
I have been to the IHOP parking lot in question. It’s just not big enough for a car to be able to accelerate to 35 mph unless the car was some expensive sportscar that could do 0 to 60 in 3 seconds. And the cop’s claim that he had nowhere to move and that he had to shoot is just not possible.
I’m still confused. Let’s say the van was heading right for him and was a massive threat, even though he’s just some random guy in civilain dress. How would he have enough time to process this information, unholster his pistol, aim, and fire several shots? And since it’s a little parking lot, he would get run over even if he killed the driver, right?..but no, the driver had enough time to process the fact he was being shot at and then swerved…in a little IHOP parking lot? 
And why would he want to kill some random guy anyway instead of just, y’know, escaping?
I would think a better idea in such a scenario where every millisecond counts, if I were the cop and didn’t want to become a parking lot pancake anyway, is to dodge to the side, out of the way. YMMV.
In Cincinnati a few years ago when I was visiting I heard on the radio that the city changed the rules for the police, saying that a suspect would not be considered to be armed if all they were doing were driving a vehicle, even if they were driving it directly at the police. This change was spurred by a number of deaths which were questionable in the minds of the public. The public perception (given by many members of the public calling into the station describing incident after incident, as well as the perception reported by the station reporters) was at least that cops would shoot unarmed suspects and then pose them in vehicles as an excuse. This was leading to racial tensions that threated riots. Police were upset saying that the new policy would make it open season to run down cops with cars.
So that explains one possible reason there is a policy against what the police officer did. Of course, it does not address the detail of this situation.
He was trapped by parked cars??? You have a cop in the US that is incapable of climbing over a parked car?
Deserve to get suspended? Fuck him, he deserved to get run over.
I did RTFuckingA, and as I read it, the officer tried to stay in front of the Jeep, to block it’s passage. The vehicle did drive towards him because the kid was trying to escape, not run him over.
If the cop hadn’t moved, do you think he would have gotten hit, or would the kid have stopped? I’m gonna think that the kid doesn’t want to kill someone, and would have stopped, or swerved into a parked car.
If the cop had moved out of the way and not fired on the Jeep, no one would be arguing. The kid would have been hauled into jail later, with additional charges, and the cop would have done his job properly, according to his own precinct rules.
Are you really saying that the cop didn’t overreact to the situation?
For your information, I don’t hate cops at all. I do think that some cops have very poor judgment and Dirty Harry complexes.
Thats’ not a very good way to judge the speed the car was actually traveling, though. Unless you see a lot of cars driving in that parking lot, and know how fast they’re going, you wouldn’t be able to gauge that.
You do hate America though, don’t you?
Nah, I just hate our freedom. 
I don’t think a lot of you live in the real world. Lets stop and consider what actually happened in a dispassionate manner, shall we?
These kids decide to engage in the age old practice of dine and dash. They exit the IHOP without paying. At this point they have committed the crime of theft, albeit a minor one. I don’t think dine and dash is anyone’s idea of something worth getting excited about. They proceed to their car in an attempt to make good their escape. At some point someone, presumably the waiter, notices that this party has skipped out on their check and notifies the off-duty cop working security for the IHOP. This cop runs into the parking lot in an attempt to apprehend or identify the guilty parties. When he reaches the lot, the thieves are in their car at one end of the lot, just starting to pull out. He moves towards them, probably with his hands up in a “stop” motion, although I don’t know this for sure. Up to this point I would categorize the entire situation as relatively normal and not too alarming, which is why I don’t buy the Police Chief’s decision to suspend the officer. The kids have committed a minor crime, the cop has caught them leaving, 99 times out of 100 the whole thing would proceed as it should. The car stops, the cop gets their names/they are taken back into the IHOP where they pay/are charged with D&D/their parents are called/ etc…No big deal, it happens every day all across America. Let’s set the scene:
*************************|
B |
A |
*************************|
Where the “*” are parked cars, “A” is the cop, “B” is the car with the D&D folks in it and the parking lot exit is to the left. “A” the cop is moving towards “B” the car. Again, pretty standard stuff, nothing that I would consider threatening or dangerous. It’s the precursor to a routine bust, the kind cops make a million times a day.
Suddenly, everything changed in a split second. The driver of the car, B, decided to floor it in an attempt to escape. Despite Fear Itself’s stupid sarcasm, I seriously doubt that he intended to kill the cop. If you asked me to bet one way or the other, I’d bet he just wanted to exit the parking lot, although he might have though of scaring the cop into jumping out of the way as he was exiting. Again, no real malice intended, but what that driver has done completely changes the entire scenario. As the car accelerates towards him, the cop suddenly finds the routine situation he was in has turned deadly. A speeding car IS a deadly weapon, and this one is heading right towards him. He has split seconds to act, and he does. He attempts to get out of the way. Remember that, his first reaction was not to go for his gun, it was to jump back. Unfortunately, he’s no longer standing next to a gap between parked cars, and when he jumps back, he hits a parked car. Fearing for his life, he draws his gun and shoots, resulting in a tragic consequence.
I’d like to stop the scenario right here for a second, just before the cop draws his gun. This is where the armchair detectives are having a field day, and this is where I don’t think a lot of you have any grasp of reality. #1, we’re talking about split seconds here. A car traveling 25-35 MPH covers 37-51 feet each and every second. Nyctea has already told us that this was a small parking lot, the cop had a split second to decide what to do when his attempt to evade the car failed. Now, all of you sit here behind your computers and dispassionately analyze the situation, coming up with a million different courses of action. “He should have climbed over the parked car”, “He should have run back and gone between the cars”, “He should have read the driver’s mind and realized that he was just going to be grazed”, “He should have back flipped over the oncoming car while reaching into his utility belt for a tracking device and attaching it to the roof on his way by”. Any one of these might indeed be a better way to react, given the luxury of hindsight and time to consider his options. He didn’t have that time. He had a second or two to react to an immediately life threatening situation. He (rightly) judged his life to be in imminent danger, and so he drew his weapon and fired at the driver of the car that was bearing down on him. Here’s where we get to #2. I’ve heard people say that he shot indiscriminately because he hit the passenger and not the driver. I’ve heard people who watch too many movies claim that he should have shot out the tires. Real life doesn’t work that way. First of all, when thrust into such an immediate life and death situation, your body experiences a massive adrenaline dump. You can react faster, but that costs you methodical, deliberate actions. You don’t get to be Danny Glover at the end of Lethal Weapon 2, carefully cracking your neck before shooting the evil South African ambassador in the forehead. Frankly, I think it’s a wonder he hit the car at all, it’s not humanly possible in that situation to make one careful, aimed shot only at the driver. You shoot at the car, the objective being to make the driver swerve away from the gunfire, another totally natural human reaction. The cop did this, and that’s how the driver reacted. You aim at the driver as best as you can, sure, but there is no way to be completely accurate. Unfortunately, in this case, one of the bullets struck a passenger in the back seat. I’ve read that police determined that this bullet missed the driver by less than a foot, which I find to be remarkably accurate shooting considering the situation.
Finally, some people may think that I don’t care about the young man who was killed. That’s not true. I’ve said several times that this was a tragedy, and one that was entirely avoidable. Unfortunately, the point where the tragedy could have been avoided was not when the cop proceeded into the parking lot to peacefully flag down the getaway car. No, the point where this could have been avoided is when the driver mashed down on the accelerator and aimed at the cop. Everything else stems from that one action. I’m not even condemning the driver that much for that decision. None of these were bad kids, and I’ll bet that given a few seconds to think about it, he wouldn’t have done it. Unfortunately, he acted upon an impulse, and it was a bad impulse to act on. We all have impulses, and sometimes we act on them. In this case, all of the death and misery that followed stemmed from that momentary bad decision.
Now all of the above is based upon the facts as I understand them from the various reports of the incident that I have read. If you spot what you believe are any glaring errors, please tell me what they are and why you think so, I’ll be happy to discuss them.
I agree with your evaluation, except for one point. I don’t think that the officer was going to get hit by the car. If the officer backed up against the parked cars, there would be sufficient room for the car to pass. He wouldn’t have even been side swiped, as far as I can tell, knowing the average width of lot aisles. The kid would have had to ram the cars to hit him, and I don’t believe that’s what he would have done.
The officer overreacted to the threat of the vehicle, in my opinion. I think he is being fairly suspended for that reaction. Anyone can make the wrong split second decision - because he is a police officer does that insulate him from consequences of that decision?
Iggins,
That’s a judgment call, one that has to be made in a split second by the person on the scene. I agree with you that it’s unlikely that the driver suddenly decided to become a murderer, and in all logical likelihood, the car would have roared past the cop and out of the parking lot. BUT, that is the cop’s call to make, and as long as the vehicle was headed in his direction, I can’t fault him for making it the way he did, as I wasn’t there and he was. He obviously felt that his life was in danger from the car.
After his department changed its policies after the fact. This would be akin to being fired from your job as an accountant because you didn’t clean the restrooms, because your employer said they had decided, after the firing, to change your job description to include janitorial responsibilities and were using your failure to perform those responsibilities (before said responsibilities were added to your job description) as grounds for termination.
The police chief even admitted he was “clarifying policies.” So obviously the police chief agrees the previous policies were inappropriately vague for dealing with situations like this. Sounds like the fault is the police policies beforehand, not the officer’s.