Not breaking news, since it happened in June, but it just crossed my news feed:
TL:DR:
- Young New Zealander tourist accidentally crashes his car.
- Calls 911 for help.
- Police shoot him.
Unclear why he was behaving like he was, but OTOH the police response seemed to unnecessarily escalate the situation into a deadly one.
Doesn’t appear that anything significant has happened about this incident since. The officer who shot him is back on duty already.
Unfortunately, police in the US are given the benefit of the doubt in cases where it’s not clear (at the time) whether they are in danger. It’s a split-second decision, which sometimes leads to an innocent person being unnecessarily shot.
Longer version:
“Deputies arrived and found a single vehicle, which appeared to have been involved in an accident. The driver and sole occupant, an adult white male, immediately became argumentative and uncooperative with the deputies and had armed himself with a knife,” the statement said. “Additional law enforcement officers arrived and for over an hour tried to bring the situation to a peaceful resolution.”
“Deputies broke out windows and removed a knife, the agency wrote.”
“The suspect rearmed himself with a rock and a second knife,” the statement said. “Deputies deployed less-lethal bean bags, and Taser with negative results. The suspect eventually tried to stab an officer and was shot.”
According to the autopsy, Glass was hopped up on goofballs or something which means HE might have been the aggressor.
This description gives me the impression that something was wrong with that individual. Nevertheless, a non-lethal resolution certainly seemed to be in order.
The part I don’t get is what was the hurry to get him out of the car at all? I mean, why couldn’t they just have waited him out? One hour hardly seems long enough, and they could have stayed 10 feet away- eventually he’d have regained his sanity/drugs would have worn off/realized the cops aren’t threatening him, and this could have ended peacefullly.
This seems like the cops were having their usual paranoia and perceiving this kid as a threat, and responded in an inappropriate fashion. I mean, WHY tase a kid in a car who’s just refusing to get out? What’s the advantage of that, if he doesn’t have a gun or a hostage?
What I’ve read is that the amphetamines in his system were likely from his ADHD medication. Did you find something different somewhere?
Also, I don’t see how he could possibly be the aggressor if he refused to get out of the car.
Did you watch the video? That part is from a weird angle. The view reverses field right after the window is broken and just before the shooting starts; it appears to switch to the body cam of an officer on the other side of the car. The kid does turn toward the officer that was talking to him in the window, but it’s hard to tell if he’s attacking the officer or just reacting to the taser/bean bag. If I were a betting man, my money would be on the latter. I couldn’t tell if there was anything in his hand or not.
Have to admit I didn’t and from the description probably won’t be able to make myself watch.
It’s not graphic, that part is blacked out (but audio remains), but it’s still pretty infuriating watching how the cops responded even before the shooting.
“Hopped up on goofballs”? Is this supposed to be funny?
Typical situation of police escalating the situation, thereby increasing the risk to themselves, then because they’re at greater risk, they escalate again and increase their risk again. And so on. It’s 100% the police’s fault here that anyone was harmed.
I hope we’ve learned to take officers’ statements with a massive grain of salt. This description doesn’t capture the 1+ hour standoff.
In his 911 call asking for assistance, he told the dispatcher that he was scared and didn’t want to leave the car. He told the dispatcher he had two knives and a hammer in his car (he was an amateur geologist). When the police arrived, he offered to throw them out of the car, but the police told him not to.
The police had every opportunity to deescalate the situation, but continued to ramp it up. Glass’s actions sound like someone panicking, not someone trying to stab the officers.
One of the commanding officers there told Glass it “was time for the night to move on.” The officers smashed the glass on the passenger-side window. Glass picked up one of his knives as the police upped their aggression and several officers, including one standing on the hood of the car, trained their weapons on him. Through the passenger-side window, Glass was shot with a beanbag gun several times and began to flail in the SUV.
“Someone tase his ass,” an officer is heard saying in the video. “Someone tase him!”
An officer shoots Glass with a taser through the passenger window and the young man begins to scream and shake while holding the knife. One officer tells Glass he “can still save himself” if he drops the knife. Glass begins to yell “Lord, hear me.” As he flails around in the seat once more, an officer fires his handgun five times.
This seems a common problem with cops. They decide to ruin somebody’s life instead of put up with a bit of inconvenience. There are stories of suspects barricaded in an innocent person’s house, with no hostages, and no danger to anybody, but the cops decide it’s easier to smash the house down than just wait out the suspect.
The family has started to ask questions, pushing it back into the news cycle. It appeared a few days ago in my local news feed.
The cops were called in response to a request for help. They showed up and tried to help, and for a long time the guy was not cooperative. So, why not just leave?
I watched one of the longer videos, the one on Vice that @TroutMan linked. It’s pretty clear that the cops were escalating the situation for no good reason. In my estimation the video shows a homicide, and it’s appalling that the cop who did it is still employed and still on duty.
The young man seemed abnormal in some way – it wasn’t clear why he wouldn’t get out of the car – but that’s no reason for him to die. He wasn’t an apparent danger to himself or anyone else. And given how those trigger-happy cops were behaving, Lord knows what would have happened to him if he had gotten out of the car. Another huge failure of American policing.
On the one hand, yeah, it seems like he was acting odd and showing excessive paranoia.
But it’s tough to say he was paranoid when his fears were proven to be 100% justified.
The NBC article indicates that he had ADHD and took a prescription amphetamine for it. Also had a .01% blood alcohol level, and some THC in his system.
Clearly, the only way trained police officers can deal with a noxious cocktail like that is by killing him.
Shorter version:
Cops are fuckin’ liars.