In retrospect, the incident ended with no deaths, so good on the police. On the other hand, it is shocking to see the cruiser itself being used as a weapon, when the officer on the radio is clearly indicating for other patrol units to back off and allow the cordon to close. The car was destroyed and the suspect literally flipped into the air with the impact, so the decision was to kill the suspect, it just turned out non-lethal in the end. It was 100% luck that no other bystandards were present or in the impact area.
Pure luck and that canât be counted on and because he got lucky that doesnât mean that he was right.
He took a big chance, basically gambled without thinking it through and fortunately no one else had to pay for his recklessness.
Cops train to do cop work but I refuse to believe that this is a trained and approved method. A zillion things could go wrong besides the fact that he rammed that guy at speed, not bumped him down, and that alone couldâve completely squashed the man.
A reckless cop counting on pure luck is a very dangerous thing.
The âsuspectâ is lucky to be alive - (lucky may be debatable given the mess he has made of things)
but lucky - because he could have been killed by the car - but also lucky because it is a reasonable guess that this crisis was going to end with the suspect getting âtaken outâ by a rifle shot.
This âsuspectâ may be totally out of his mind - but in that moment, realistically, he was a walking one-man crime spree - displaying every intention to commit more criminal acts - it is not like he was un-armed ⌠it was not like he was simply walking away from / running away from the police in an attempt to simply escape questioning or arrest - he was, by all accounts, fully armed and marching straight toward another opportunity to create harm.
That having been said - a police car is a vehicle - not a weapon. The officer was being a rogue âcowboyâ and while it played out in a way that seems OK - it could have gone far far worse ( say the suspect avoided getting hit - cruiser crashed - suspect grabbed officers weapons - cascade of disaster ensues)
I donât think I heard any suggestions that it was or should be. I agree that high-speed ramming doesnât make sense as a consistent response to dangerous people on the street. And I donât think that even very heavy-handed police forces would be happy to have a chronically reckless improviser on their hands. But we donât know about the guy in questionâs history. We do know it was a very volatile and dangerous situation. If you think the officer was completely wrong and necessarily constitutes a danger, well, thatâs a valid opinion but one Iâm not as sure about myself. I still think, from the look of things, a civilian could have walked or driven into the area at any moment. Thatâs all I know.
There you go, that opinion goes both ways. There is obviously not a perfect and simple answer but just because this guy didnât hurt anyone else while he pulled his ram through the wall tactic doesnât mean that its all good. He endangered the public as well.
We also donât know the cops history as I mentioned above. All of these cop stories wind up with proof that the cop has a history of doing similar things and only getting a slap on the wrist. I canât imagine that this particular cop chose this incident as his first time to go for it, balls out. That civilian that you mention that might have ventured into the scene also might have been on the other side of the vehicle in the driveway or on the other side of that wall.
The cop took the situation into his own hands and lucked out, any number of things might have or could have happened.
The guy isnât dead. He was released into police custody after 2 days in the hospital. The patrol car took the brunt of the injurt as well as the guy. On further thinking the cop wouldâve been very vulnerable had he tried to exit his patrol car in that situation. I am very familiar with the area where this happened. It could easily become exceedingly ugly had the police not stopped this guy⌠Itâs too bad there wasnât another less violent way to deal with this.
You canât accelerate into a pedestrian and hit him that hard without expecting to kill them. This âit all worked out greatâ is BS. He meant to kill him, plain and simple. Iâve seen plenty of videos of cops talking to suicidal people with guns. I guess thatâs too much to ask anymore.
This suicidal guy looked much more like a suicide by cop kind of guy. Two robberies, fire arm discharge and casually walking with the gun while followed by tons of cops. I agree he might be crazy, that doesnât mean he couldnât cause more harm.
While Joe Taxpayer might well have opted for the economical use of a reasonable number of .40 caliber rounds as an alternative to a thrashed Crown Vic, a busted masonry wall and a hospital bill for the care of the defendant, all things considered and with apologies to John Wayne, not the worst possible outcome at all.
I agree. I donât see the need to hit him in the first place, and I definitely donât see the need to speed up to ensure he is injured. The officer could have paralyzed this guy or hurt him to where he has lifelong issues.
This wasnât a shoplifter or jaywalker like Michael Brown. He wasnât running from a bogus taillight ticket like Walter Scott.
The guy who got hit by the car had already committed robbery & assault THAT DAY. He was carrying a loaded rifle. He was walking towards a concrete block fence that would have given him an excellent defense to shoot at the two cop cars following him.
This is exactly the kind of fleeing felon who needs to be taken down in this kind of manner.
Itâs pretty simple. We have recently been through a flood of stories about bad policing. Yes there are other subplots, such as institutional racism, but almost every one of these cases involves incredibly stupidd choices by supposedly highly trained professionals.
Using a car to ram a suspect is use of deadly force. The odds of killing the person with the car are certainly no worse than killing someone with their gun, except cops are trained how and when to use their gun. itâs hard to believe they get any training about how to use their car as a weapon. Also there is clearly more to the story of how one cop decided to take matters into his own hands. The police officer who used his car as a weapon drove around the car that was relaying the situation to the other cops near the scene. he seemed totally shocked by what happened.
I can imagine an extreme case where ramming a person, in order to kill them may be the only choice a police officer has. The incident involving heavily armed bank robbers in LA a few decades ago might have been a case where that was the only effective. But it is very hard to imagine how that is the case in this scenario.
Itâs much harder to imagine why it is justified to use a weapon of deadly force to save a person from killing him or herself. Thatâs just weird.
