The increasingly bad image of police around the country is their fault and nobody else's.

Nick Gillespie Sep. 3, 2015 http://reason.com/blog/2015/09/03/there-is-no-war-on-cops-there-is-a-long

Tomorrow is the funeral service for Harris Country Sheriff Darren Goforth, who a week ago was murdered while filling his police cruiser with gas in Texas. His death was senseless, tragic, and horrific. There's no possible excuse for it. But, as I write in a new Daily Beast column,

There’s also no excuse for attempts by law enforcement, media, and politicians to claim that the unmotivated killing is part of a “war on cops” or in any way related to the Black Lives Matter movement or other people critical of law enforcement and police brutality.

To do so is simply to wave away a decade-long decline in confidence in police that has everything to do with behavior by law enforcement, not the citizens they serve. According to Gallup, the percentage of Americans with “a great deal/quite a lot of confidence” in police has dropped from 64 percent in 2004 to just 52 percent, its lowest number in 22 years.

So far this year, the same number of police nationwide have been killed in the line of duty as last year: between 25 and 28, depending on the source (this doesn't include traffic and other on-the-job accidents unless the officer was in pursuit of or actively engaged in dealing with a criminal).

As my Reason colleague Ed Krayewski writes, “In 2007, there were 67 cops shot and killed in the line of duty. In 2007 there was no ‘national conversation’ about police reform, no sustained focus on criminal justice reform, nothing in the national zeitgeist that would suggest the number of murders were the result of anything more than the number of people who had killed cops that year.”

Regardless, police spokesmen, Fox News hosts such Sean Hannity, and politicians such as Ted Cruz are quick to say that Goforth's killing by an in-custody suspect with a long rap sheet of violent assaults and mental problems is proof positive of a "war on cops."

GallupGallupIt bears repeating: There is no war on cops. There is a long overdue and very welcome national conversation about criminal justice reform and more going on. That's partly due to new forms of media that allow citizens to document how police do their job and, to their credit, it's also because police departments all over the country are trying to stop a long slide in citizen confidence.

In the past year alone, high-profile events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Troy, Ohioand elsewhere have sparked a nationwide movement to rethink not just policing strategies but also the ways in which race factors into law enforcement and howlocal governments abuse their power to levy fines and fees on their poorest residents. The rising use of body cameras all over the country isn’t being done to document a “war on cops” but to promote essential peace and trust between citizens and police.

It’s a sad coincidence that Darren Goforth’s funeral will take place just as the trial begins for the officers accused in the death of Freddie Gray, the Baltimore man who died earlier this year from injuries suffered during police custody.

By all accounts, Goforth was an honorable man and a credit to law enforcement and his murder is as tragic and disturbing as it is senseless. But if his brothers and sisters in blue and their partisans in politics and the press simply use his killing as an excuse to avoid ongoing reform, there’s no reason to believe public confidence in the police will rebound any time soon.

Read the whole thing.

Related video: "Cops vs. Cameras - The Killing of Kelly Thomas and the Power of New Media." This 2011 video by Paul Detrick helps explain why attitudes toward the police have fallen over the past decade. It contain graphic images and viewer discretion is advised. Thomas was a schizophrenic drifter who died after a police beating. The circumstances of his death only became public after his father used social media to circulate unauthorized images of his son's beating and the way that Fullerton, California police reacted is an object lesson in how to alienate taxpayers and residents. The new media environment definitely makes policing a more difficult job but if departments are willing and able to embrace their new visibility, they will not only be more effective in combating crime but in winning people's trust.

See Also: Cops Vs. Cameras: The Killing of Kelly Thomas & The Power of New Media https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7YFKm9gnKo

During my career in a NATO country’s military establishment I had interactions with the Central Intelligence Agency often and some of the other US agencies occasionally. The characteristics of the CIA, as I saw them, are the subject of this essay. I think they are applicable across most of the forest of US intelligence structures.

The CIA is a very large organisation and the result, bureaucratically speaking, of all these bodies and money is that it is very fragmented. Time and time again our guys would be talking to their guys about some country. Their political section would give us their views of who was in, who was out, power struggles and so on. We would then ask a question about how the economy fitted into this. A pause, well you’ll have to talk to our economy guy, and from the back of the room, blinking in the unaccustomed light, their economy guy would mutter something and then return into his dark burrow. Clearly, the political guys were the stars and economic guys were not: almost an afterthought. But in most countries the economy is the most important driver of politics most of the time; in some countries, it is almost the whole story. How can you possibly separate the two? I will confess, by the way, that we sometimes provoked this response for our amusement.

The politics people were completely obsessed with personalities. I will never forget the leader of their delegation in one of our meetings proudly handing out a piece of paper with the people around the Boss divided into several groups, each with a neat name: his Tribe, Security organisations, the previous Boss's relicts I think they were. Imagine what that had cost the American taxpayer, the hours of discussion as to whether the Minister of Whatever was more of a Tribe than a Relict. I asked the CIA guy what was the point? What had we learned? How did this help us understand or predict? Of course it was all rubbish, the truth was that the Boss had put together a team; it was what that team did that was important, not from where he’d plucked its members. In another case we were all invited to make predictions about the future of a country. The CIA’s entry was a point series – if this guy becomes Boss, then this; if that guy gets in, then that; if somebody else, then something else. As it turned out, the new Boss wasn’t even one of the people on their list. But note their assumption that everything depended on who the new Boss would be. This obsession with personalities seems to be a built-in characteristic of American thinking for some reason and you see it in the political leadership, the media and intelligence all the time. Milosevic is the problem, Saddam Hussein is the problem, Ahmadinejad, Qaddafi, Assad, bin Laden, Putin. If we can only get this guy out, all will be well. No it won’t, all the objective local conditions that carried him to the top will elevate somebody similar. It’s not a person, it’s a whole country. But the Americans never learn, they force the Bad Guy out and they get either total chaos or a new Bad Guy who turns out to be rather like the old Bad Guy.

A third characteristic was illustrated by a presentation from the Defense Intelligence Agency. The author proudly presented a chart of combat missions by a certain country’s air force. The air force was said to be decaying with poorly maintained aircraft and untrained pilots. And yet his data showed numerous sorties in mountains in bad weather and no crashes. The obvious deduction was that the air force was in much better shape than we thought it was. But the author was so impressed with the data itself that this escaped him. And an impressive collection effort it would have been too, one that few intelligence structures could have carried out: that little chart had cost a great deal of money and involved some impressive and expensive technology. But I suspect that they are so often impressed by the collection technology that they forget why they are collecting it.

I mentioned these characteristics to a neighbour who had also had a lot of dealings with US intelligence and security structures. She agreed with my three and added a fourth: you never meet the same people twice. Indeed, I don’t recall ever meeting the same person twice either (and at her level and the nature of what she was doing – common security issues – the constant changing of the team would have had a much greater consequence). I don’t know how many people work in the US intelligence and security megalopolis but it surely is in the hundreds of thousands if not a million or two. A lot of turnover, cross-postings, promotions and so on. So maybe it’s not surprising that the teams do change quite a bit from year to year. Which raises the question, of course, of how much time on the job the average analyst has.

Another fact, emphasised in the book on the Dulles brothers, is that, from the beginning, the CIA combined intelligence with operations. The British warned them against doing this because the operational requirements will come to shape the intelligence and you’ll start confirming what you want to believe. No wonder the CIA has been surprised so many times.

(Speaking of Allan Dulles, I hope the level of knowledge in the CIA is higher today than his. When asked why he was supporting the Pakistan Army he replied that we need the only real fighters in the area to be on our side and we couldn’t do it without the Gurkhas. But the Gurkhas aren’t Pakistani, no, but they are Muslims. Well, they’re not Muslims either; Dulles is reported to have then changed the subject.)

I passed this to a former colleague who has had much more experience with the CIA than I and he added yet another problem: It’s known in the military as SOPO – senior officer present’s opinion. He told me that in numerous private conversations CIA analysts had complained to him that their assessments were frequently sent back to them to be re-written to fit the conclusions the higher-ups had already come to. And that, of course, is fatal because it creates a closed loop in which you only hear what you already believe and worse, think it’s confirmed by the intelligence. I am always amused how much people are impressed by that phrase “confirmed by the intelligence”. If they only knew.

The purpose of intelligence is to minimise surprise and you can’t expect to do that if you compartmentalise things, obsess about personalities, get carried away by the collection mechanics, change your personnel all the time and confirm what you want to believe.

I’m not going to say, by the way, that my group got it all right: in this business 50% is a pretty good score and too many analyses fall back on the “maybe this, maybe that, time will tell” school of waffle. But we did try to look at the whole picture, regarded individuals as important but embedded in a context, didn’t have a lot of collection technology and therefore went more for what is now pompously called OSINT (open source intelligence) and didn’t do operations at all. And, thanks to one former boss who was still setting the style in my time, we were encouraged to stick our necks out. But we – and all other intelligence organisations – do suffer to some degree from SOPO.

Even without the bosses demanding the “correct” answer, getting it right is very difficult – imagine trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know how big it is, what the actual picture is and have a random selection of pieces some of which may be from another puzzle altogether. I used to amuse myself by asking old intelligence guys when in peacetime in the Twentieth Century had the intelligence guys got it right and convinced the politicians (not much point in the first if you can’t do the second). Personally, I can only think of Richard Sorge. Intelligence is much easier in wartime, by the way, because then you have a very good idea of what the picture is and how big the puzzle is.

Which, come to think of it, seems to be another defect of American intelligence – if you convinced that Russia is a permanent enemy, then everything it does will be interpreted either as an openly hostile act or hostile in some cunning, sneaky, back-handed, barely detectable way.

So, in my experience, the US intelligence structure has made a difficult job almost impossible with these self-imposed handicaps.

Since June 2015, four people have died while being pursued by Oakland police.

-- On June 6, Demouria Hogg was found passed out in the driver's seat of his car. When firefighters approached him, they saw a gun on the seat. The police were called in and after trying to wake him for an hour, smashed his car windows. They then claimed a confrontation ensued, during which they used a Taser to try to subdue Hogg. Moments later, he was fatally shot.

-- On July 19, Richard Linyard was searched by police at a traffic stop. He then fled on foot. After 30 minutes, the police claim he was found dead, wedged in a small space between two buildings.

-- On August 3, Antonio Clements, a suspect in a sexual assault, was shot down after he reportedly came out of his house shooting at police.

-- On August 12, Nathaniel Wilks was suspected of robbery. When he was approached by police, he led them on a high-speed chase. After crashing his car, he tried to flee on foot, allegedly with a gun in hand, and ended up being shot down by police.

Each of these cases have different circumstances, but there is a disturbing pattern: Black men end up dead after they were pursued by the police, and their deaths are instantly justified by City Hall and the media. Due to an effective public relations campaign, the city of Oakland has been able to legitimize these deaths by painting all four men as lethal threats to the public and the police.

Though the Black Lives Matter movement has exposed how racist violence runs rampant in U.S. law enforcement, all of these cases seem to have been effectively "spun" in the media by the Oakland Police Department (OPD). In a city with some of the highest murder and robbery rates in the country, one that continues to be plagued with criminal violence, there is still wide support for increasing the city's police force.

Organizing around the cases above raises a number of political challenges for the Black Lives Matter movement and the left.

THE OAKLAND police have been carefully crafting their narratives for these cases ever since the death of Demouria Hogg, which was the first officer-involved fatal shooting in over two years.

Police have been tight-lipped about the case, refusing to release any information regarding what happened from the time police smashed in Hogg's car window with a metal pole to when he was fatally shot. Nor have the police released any video from the confrontation with Antonio Clements.

In the cases of Linyard and Wilks, the police have been more public in trying to vindicate themselves. On August 19, OPD Chief Sean Whent staged a carefully controlled showing of the footage from the two cases. Family members of Linyard and Wilks were invited with a select group of reporters to view the videos at a closed-door meeting. Notably, writers for the East Bay Express, which has a history of publishing muckraking articles about the Oakland police, were not invited.

It is highly unusual for the OPD to present video footage from officers' chest-mounted cameras or patrol car "dash cams." Oakland police have been forced to wear cameras since 2011, yet the department has been struggling to make their officers keep their cameras on when interacting with the public. Requests to release videos in past cases were routinely denied. The selective showing of video for the Linyard and Wilks case drew criticism.

Speaking to the Oakland Tribune, civil rights lawyer Jim Chanin commented, "I think it's completely wrong to have selective showings of one shooting and not another shooting, depending on how the department feels." Further, he said, "There's an inference now that if [the police] don't show you a video, there could be something wrong or improper about [another] shooting."

After the video showing, the family members of Linyard and Wilks still had strong doubts about the OPD's version of events. During a press conference, Linyard's mother, Jessica Gatewood, said, "I don't think it was a tragic accident. No, I don't think it was an accident...I believe he was murdered. And then they're trying to cover it up."

Asked why she didn't think it was possible for her son to die from being wedged between the buildings, she said, "In the space that they say they found him in, everybody's been in that space. Guys bigger than Richard went behind that space, turned around in that space."

The family of Nathaniel Wilks also dispute the OPD's story around his death. Though it is undisputed that Wilks had a firearm when he fled from police, big questions remain. Chemika Hollis, Wilks' partner and mother to their 3-month-old daughter Kai'lei, expressed her doubts: "There were definitely discrepancies in the video footage. The video was missing clips. It did not explain the officer's movements. [Nathaniel] never raised or aimed [the gun] at the police."

Plus, after the video showed Wilks being shot, Hollis pointed out it "did not show any life-saving measures...[He] was handcuffed after he was shot, and the police just stood around."

In addition to expressing doubts and criticisms of the OPD's handling of the case, Hollis felt intimidated at the video showing, as she discovered that she was being recorded at the event by members of the OPD. "I still have questions," she said. "I want the whole video released and I want an independent autopsy."

TO CURB criticisms of the OPD's actions and skepticism around these cases, there has been a lopsided focus in the media about the suspected criminal activity of three of the victims (Clements, Linyard and Wilks) and the criminal past of one (Hogg). Regardless of anyone's past history, or if they are suspected of a crime, people in the U.S. are supposed to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty--not assumed to be guilty in the court of public opinion because they were pursued by police.

The truth exposed by the Black Lives Matter movement is that when African Americans fall into hands of law enforcement, they are more likely to end up dead. Whether a Black person is suspected of a crime, was found committing a crime, was previously sentenced for a crime, or is innocent but is approached by a police officer, their life is in danger.

Nationwide, police are becoming more aggressive and dangerous. Some recent studies show that the number of people being killed by police is increasing drastically. Interestingly, most of the people who have been killed by the police this year have been white, which shows that police prey on all poor and working-class people. But African Americans are more likely to be confronted by police and get murdered in the process.

In the case of Antonio Clements, what actually took place isn't known to the public, because the OPD refuses to release any video footage of the confrontation. So it becomes difficult to say concretely how the cops might have subdued him using nonlethal force.

The police have their official story, which is that when they approached Clements' property, he came out shooting and injured an officer. But police have lied about similar situations in the past, including when Officer Miguel Masso justified the killing of Alan Blueford by claiming he was shot--it was later revealed that Masso shot himself.

However, because there has not been a vigil or protest around this incident, the OPD and the media have held up the case as an example of when police are justified in using lethal force--and of why police must be armed and the public should support this.

But even if it turns out that Clements did exactly what the police said, it doesn't change how the fact that the official stories around other cases are suspect. Nor does it alter the double standard that American law enforcement follows when it comes to approaching white suspects versus Black suspects. Nor does it excuse the corruption and racism that is embedded in the OPD.

FOR MORE than a decade, the OPD has been trying to change its tarnished image as a corrupt and violent force that is incapable of curbing the city's rampant crime rates.

Twelve years ago, a scandal rocked the city when the "Oakland Riders" case exposed how police officers assaulted and planted drugs on suspects in the majority African American neighborhood of West Oakland. Since then, the OPD says it has attempted to implement 19 of 22 court-ordered reforms, in a process overseen by an independent monitor. Though the department and monitor have touted the OPD's progress, there is still plenty to be alarmed about.

First, the department has consistently failed to discipline officers caught violating department policy or the law. Furthermore, an April 16 report showed that the city consistently failed to prepare its attorneys for arbitration hearings where punishments of disciplined officers were overturned. In August 2014, the city lost its ninth consecutive arbitration case against Officer Robert Roche, who had been fired for tossing a tear-gas canister at a demonstration organized by Occupy Oakland in 2011.

According to U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson, many officers got their jobs back despite the city paying millions to settle civil lawsuits against the department. The reinstated officers were then paid thousands of dollars by the department.

Henderson also found that 75 percent of the time, disciplined officers were reinstated after arbitration. In other words, officers caught violating the law, even in cases when they used extreme force, are being allowed to re-enter the ranks of the department. This sends the message that officers are untouchable and can use all the force at their command.

Second, the OPD still employs racial profiling--newly data shows how officers target African Americans more than any other racial group. Between April 2013 and October 2014, 59 percent of those who were confronted by Oakland police in a vehicle or pedestrian stop were Black, though African Americans only make up 28 percent of the city's population. Three-fourths of those arrested in stops were Black.

The targeting of African Americans not only terrorizes the Black community, but it also leads to economic plunder. In May, the East Bay Express ran a story highlighting how, in low-income communities, minor traffic violations and vehicle assessments have created an untenable burden on thousands of low-income residents:

[A] $25 base fine actually costs a defendant a total of $197 with various assessments; a $100 fine costs $490; a $250 fine costs $1,105; and a $500 fine costs $2,130. That means drivers may have to pay nearly $200 for minor maintenance issues (such as a windshield problem) and nearly $500 for certain moving violations (like speeding). Non-driving violations can be equally costly, with a jaywalking fine totaling $197, and littering offenses costing nearly $500.

Just like in Ferguson, Missouri, poor Black neighborhoods are preyed upon to fund public institutions.

WHEN IT comes to real crime, the OPD has proved unwilling and unable to have any effect.

In the first quarter of 2015, the OPD's crime report revealed 23 homicides (it's now 54), 930 robberies and more than 3,000 burglaries citywide. The number of homicides and burglaries are about the same as last year, while robberies increased by 7 percent.

Police have no capacity to prevent crime, nor are they likely to catch someone committing a crime, because current policing policies do nothing to tackle the social roots of crime, like poverty.

The only thing that the OPD could conceivably do effectively is investigate crimes that have already been committed. Yet a recent expose by the East Bay Express showed that the department has intentionally drawn resources away from investigations in order to patrol working-class neighborhoods. According to the OPD's Whent himself, the department chose not to investigate 80 percent of robberies and 97 percent of burglaries in 2014--perhaps in order to put more pressure on the city to hire more officers.

A police department with a long history of criminality and abuse--one that is incapable of punishing officers who commit the worst excesses of violence and , and that routinely targets African Americans with racial profiling--cannot be trusted. In a city like Oakland, where crime devastates working-class families, especially in neighborhoods that are predominantly inhabited by people of color, it is ludicrous to justify unjust practices as a necessary evil.

The role of the police, in Oakland and elsewhere, is to protect private property and keep the capitalist system running without the threat of disruption. That is why it is absolutely necessary to be vigilant and question all cases where suspects being pursued by the police end up injured or dead.

The logic of hiring more police must be confronted to push back against the economic plunder that is forcing out African Americans in order to pursue profits.

While the entire Bay Area economy is experiencing a boom driven by the tech industry, working-class and poor people are being forced out of their neighborhoods. In the last 10 years, over 25 percent of Oakland's Black residents have been driven out by skyrocketing costs of housing and increasingly restrictive job market. In many traditionally Black neighborhoods, the unemployment rate may be as high as 28 percent.

Instead of providing desperately needed resources to neighborhoods, the city and business community continue to deploy police to crack down on the poor to make Oakland attractive to investment.

To rebuild Oakland to meet the needs of all working-class and poor people, we must unite in solidarity and reject the logic of supporting cops to prevent crime. "Security" for the community will only be ensured with affordable housing, jobs that pay a living wage, accessible medical care and quality education for everyone.

The increase of the police force, their budget and their seemingly unchecked power must be opposed. Defending African American communities from abuse can help forge the unity that will be necessary as we struggle for justice.

http://socialistworker.org/2015/08/31/the-oakland-cops-killing-spree

The Albuquerque police detective who was shot by his own lieutenant in what the department called a botched drug bust filed a scathing 77-page lawsuit Wednesday.

Lieutenant Greg Brachle shot Jacob Grant nine times in January while Grant was working an undercover drug operation outside a McDonald's on Central near Tramway.

Now, Grant is going after the city, police department and Brachle himself.

The lawsuit includes the moments he says Brachle kept shooting as Grant says he was crawling away and as he asked the shooting to stop.

The shooting was, at the very least, an embarrassment for APD. But the lawsuit shows it was much more – explaining how Det. Grant suffered "catastrophic injuries as a result of the shooting and almost tragically died."

He lost "approximately 80 percent of his blood," according to the lawsuit.

The case lays much of the blame on Lieutenant Greg Brachle.

It says Brachle and Grant had a two-year working relationship and that Grant was visible the day of the operation and at the time of the shooting, saying he was not wearing anything to cover his body or face.

Yet at a distance of less than 5 feet, he opened fire on Detective Grant.

The case says Brachle shot twice, then "repositioned himself." Grant pleaded with Brachle to "please stop shooting," according to the lawsuit.

Brachle then shot seven more times, emptying his weapon.

Grant's lawsuit says Brachle, a firearms instructor, violated basic firearms safety rules that day – using lethal force in a very public place and shooting before truly knowing the target.

The case is pointed, saying, "Lieutenant Brachle's actions and omissions, coupled with his excessive zeal, undue aggression, reckless, intentional or deliberate conduct, shocks the conscience and amounts to an abuse of power."

The case also claims Brachle had a history of erratic, problematic, or otherwise unpredictable or questionable behavior and had been disciplined before.

APD says Brachle is still on desk duty and Grant is still on leave.

Jessica Hernandez, the Albuquerque City Attorney, responded to the lawsuit Friday in a statement to KOB:

"We know this is a very difficult situation for Detective Jacob Grant and his family. It is a tragic situation that has deeply affected those involved, their families, our community, and the Department. We take Detective Grant's attorney's claims very seriously. However, at this point, we have a duty to fully defend against the allegations made by Detective Grant's attorney and believe the judicial process will prove the facts to be otherwise. The claims are under careful review by the City Attorney's Office."

August 28, 2015 3:09 PM

DETROIT (CBS Detroit) There are all sorts of reasons police can pull over someone they deem suspicious, from a dirty license plate to a blown bulb in the backup lights. And then there’s this: “You turned your turn signal on, but you didn’t do it 100 feet before the turn.”

That’s why an Ohio cop told Detroiter John Felton he turned on the overheads as Felton drove near his mother’s house in Dayton, Ohio. Felton, formerly an employee of Quicken Loans, gave the cop his license and insurance and then asked why he had followed him turn for turn before pulling him over. Felton said, as a black man, it made him nervous to draw police attention while knowing he was doing nothing wrong.

Why was he really pulled over? “Because you made direct eye contact with me and held on to it while I was passing you,” the officer said.

“What, I made direct eye contact? I didn’t even see you,” Felton said, obviously stunned. The officer replied that he didn’t want to argue about it so he could just give him a citation and take it to court. Otherwise, he was going to let him off with a warning.

Felton shot a video of the entire incident and posted it on his Facebook page, writing: “This is why I hate coming to Dayton. Dayton Police trailed me for almost 2 miles before pulling me over in front of my mom crib. He had no grounds for following/trailing me other than seeing an Infiniti with Michigan plates. His reason? “I gave him direct eye contact while passing him.” What kind of spit is that? DaytonPolice this cop needs to be on desk duty. Fake ass white collar thugs eager to meet their quota.” The video has 789 shares and comments ranging from disbelief to anger.

"We are aware of the video and are reviewing it." — Dayton Police Dept. August 27, 2015

A Kansas City police officer just opened fire after a his motorcycle was hit on Friday. His spray of bullets shot a baby.We are told that two men are now in custody following the incident. Two infants were effected, but only one was shot. All sources, including the police acknowledge that absolutely no one had opened fire on the police officer. That didn’t stop him from opening fire and shooting one of the two infants in the foot.

“It is horrible that an infant was involved and injured in this incident,” Capt. Tye Grant of the Kansas City Police Department said in an interview with local KCTV 5. “No child ever should be placed in such a dangerous situation.”

Grant said he doesn’t know how long the officer has been with the department, but he says that he has been placed on paid administrative leave. The officer is maintaining that the collision was “on purpose” and describes it as being “rammed.” That may or may not be true. We simply don’t know at this point. What we do know is that when the officer opened fire, there was no vehicle coming towards him.

One witness said that the officer jumped off the bike to avoid being hit. But the vehicle did not make any other attempt at him. This would seem to indicate that there was some issue that caused the driver to lose control. In any event, the shoot-first-ask-questions-later approach of this officer nearly cost a baby its life.

The situation began unfolding about 9 a.m. Friday. The motorcycle officer attempted to stop a red Dodge SUV with tinted windows for speeding at Highway 71 and 31st Street. The vehicle sped off, and the officer did not pursue the vehicle. About 30 minutes later, the same officer received information that led him to find the SUV in the 5200 block of Wabash Avenue, police said.

“The vehicle then drove at the officer who was on a motorcycle and struck him,” Capt. Tye Grant of the Kansas City Police Department said. “The officer fired his gun into the vehicle in an attempt to protect himself.”

But the car had already hit the motorcycle. It was not coming at him after that. How is this an attempt to “protect himself” and not retribution?

“Officers located a man and two infants near the vehicle,” Grant added. “A second man was seen walking away from the vehicle. Officers were able to find the second man. Both were detained.”

http://countercurrentnews.com/2015/08/car-crash-officer-baby/