Deputy Shooting Of Man Caught On Tape
 

Link

Watching the video sickened me. To be clear, this was the passenger in a car that led police on a 100-mph chase. Note I said "passenger." I didn't see the chase.

What I DID see was this guy lying on the ground, talking to the cop. I HEARD him ordered to "get up." I HEARD him say, "I'm getting up." I SAW the cop shoot him three or four times, and HEARD the cop yell at him to "Shut the bleep up" as he lay there moaning.

Now the cop is temporarily off duty, in order give him extra time to come up with a bullshit excuse.

On my local news, there was already a police spokesman attempting to downplay the cop's actions. I would really enjoy hearing anyone, police or otherwise, explain to me how the cop acted reasonably, although you'd have to see the video, which I can't get yet.

I have not seen the video, but have read the account on several different news services today. Something had to have gone terribly wrong.


Anyone know what happened to the driver?

Welcome to the police state.
This kind of stuff happens all the time.
One of the major reasons I moved to a different state.
I couldn't even walk to the grocery store
without getting stoped and questioned.

somewhere along the line...we seemed to accept the propostition that the police would act theatrically...to impose not just the physical enactment of order...but also the pyschological projection of it.

The swat team, the militarized tactics, the helicopters sweeping in from the sky, and the urban combat motif...all contribute to the point where our relationship with the police is that of a civilian population to a occupying army.

somehow, i feel a great nostaligia for the neighborhood beat cop who walked the streets, and knew the people on a basis other than having slammed their faces into the pavement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Za589YJtUUU

this is the CNN vid
someone taped and uploaded to youtube

the site is kinda' slow :hmm: but it works

Attempted murder. Try him and convict him. Make sure other cops see that they are resonsible for their actions.

Edit: If police officers are going to be confused by the dark, or scared to the point of tunnel vision, or whatever, then we should take their guns. There is no excuse. There is no excuse.

I want to know how you shoot a guy, lying on the ground, 3-4 times, at point blank and not kill him.

The officer is not only a nut job, but apparently the force there needs to work on marksmanship.

Agreed, but my gut feeling is that at worst, he'll just get fired.

I'd add to what you've said--A local cop tried to make excuses for what I saw. He should be fired if he can't see that this was inexcusable.

we're real close to a reckoning in this country.


and goddamned I'd be glad to fire the first shot.


fucking pos peace officers, this motherfucker should be shot.

Can I be on your side?

Do you get as angry when law abiding citizens are shot by common criminals? Do you fire the first shot then?

cop shoots military man complying with cop's orders.....attempted murder, gross misconduct, conduct unbecoming an officer.

hell, I say put him in front of a military tribunal.

I'm a firm believer that gun control is hitting what you aim at. If you don't have the presence of mind to kill something you shoot at from point blank range, you have no business as a licensed gun owner. If you don't have the presence of mind to refrain from shooting a person following your orders as a licensed law enforcement officer (aka officer of the peace), you should have your badge stripped of you.

Attempter murder of federal employee/agent. Life without parole. No plausible excuse with the taping of it. The only reason I would say it wasn't attempted murder is that from that range, the officer should have had no problems killing the man. So part of me thinks that it should be assault with a deadly weapon, attempted manslaughter (due to the officer's pisspoor aim from that distance), with 25 to life in the plea.

I guess the cops get away with a lot if you consider what would have happened if the Air force officer was taped doing the same to a civillian intruder in an airforce base in Iraq.

He'd be facing court martial for attempted murder.

From what I saw of the tape on the news this is truly disturbing. I hope there is more to this than the tape shows. It is hard to imagine a trained officer getting so spooked from this confrontation that he fires multiple times at a man laying on the ground who is trying to follow his order to get up. He must have thought the guy was going for a weapon or something, what other explaination could there be?

Just to play Devil's advocate. Maybe the cop said "Don't get up" and all we can here is the "get up" part. The video isn't the best.

Either way he shouldn't have shot the guy. The only time he should have shot is if the guy stood all the way up and started to advance towards him.
This is just horrible. Just hope the MP is ok.

I haven't seen the video, but if it's clear that the guy said "I'm getting up" right afterwards, you can probably assume he said "Get up." I don't think a person would be contrary towards someone with a gun aimed at them just for kicks.

You are awarded the prize for being the first to voice what the defense attorney's argument will be.

It's harder to predict what the explanation will be for him yelling "Shut the bleep up" while the guy was moaning.

In the video, you can hear a neighbor say "Why'd you shoot him when you told him to get up?"

That may not be an exact quote, but it's very close.

I think that since this has now hit CNN, it's pretty safe to say that at the absolute minimum this cop is going to lose his job and will most likely be prosecuted. I'm guessing that he'll plea bargain down to something like attempted manslaughter and serve a minimal time in jail if at all.

The real fun is going to be at the civil trial where the plantiff's attorney is going to try to play the tape over and over again for the jury. I hope that the City of Chino has been paying their insurance premiums because this is going to be pretty expensive. It's hard to predict jury awards, but I'll throw out $5M as a minimum with really no ceiling.

Chino contracts with the San Bernardino county Sheriff, one of the largest (by population) in the nation, and THE largest in the continental US, geographically (larger then several states, even). I doubt this will rest solely on Chino's shoulders (the Cow Capital of California!).

Obviously, though, in a situation like this: everyone looses.

I assumed that this was Chino PD, which was probably pretty stupid of me since I used to live in Riverside and should know better. My best wishes are now correctly extended to San Bernadino County and their insurance premiums thanks to Micah's astute observation. The City will probably be dismissed since it wasn't their employee or action. At least they should be, but this may be one of those cases where the judge starts looking for deep pockets that actually have cash in them. This is actually better for the claimant since the County would almost certainly be carrying higher limits than a small city like Chino. I'd guess at $40M, but that's just an educated guess and just more of a mental exercise for myself than anything else.

yeah, that does piss me off.

hasn't happened in front of me yet, but if it does the perp's ass is grass.



and willravel, yes you can be on my side :lol:

I have listened to the tape rather than watched it. From this, I suspect I have an explanation for what happened:

The cop was clearly rattled after the 100+ MPH chase. He reasonably feared the occupants were armed and dangerous. Light was low, and his visibility of the fugitives was not good; the possibility of one of them drawing a weapon unseen was quite real.
The cop, in his hyped-up state, was less than clear in his enunciation of his wish that the fugitives (now lying down) remain there; his command “don’t GET UP!!” sounded more like “GET UP”, though listening calmly I can hear it either way.
The cop shot the guy when he started to rise, in his mind in direct defiance of command. In those circumstances the shooting would have made sense.
Having listened to the tape this is plausible. And the cop is a veteran with no history of shooting or violence of any kind on his record, which makes it seem less likely that he is just a trigger happy thug.

Before you flame me, please consider the difference between “explanation of” and “excuse for” what happened.

If my explanation is correct, the fault lies (mostly) in the officer being unable to clearly communicate in a stressful situation. They are specifically trained for this, since stressful situations are to be expected and the potential consequences are obvious. The officer should have been very clear in his commands, and he was not.

I'm sickened by this but not surprised. Another cop acts like a pig and makes that good ones look bad. All I can really say is that the airman is lucky this was taped. Otherwise, they'd probably be putting him on trial for assault or somehting like that.

well, I believe we can now see the real reason why alot of law enforcement officers don't want law abiding citizens to carry weapons, open or concealed, because someone might have had to shoot that officer to prevent the murder of a citizen.

They're pissed off about that group of citizens that carries videocams and films them, too.

I have heard, but not seen in print, the opposite of this. I'm sure the facts will come out in due time. Unless the facts are unfavorable, in which case the PD will try to squelch any reference to his record.

In a situation like that, I've never seen any cop do other than yell, in a VERY loud voice, "FREEZE, MOTHERFUCKER!!" or words to that effect.

Someone is still going to have to explain to me what part of their procedure manual states the cop is to tell a shooting victim to "Shut the fuck up."

I haven't watched a video of it, but if the transcript in the news article that Marv posted is correct, there is no explanation, that I can think of, for firing the gun. Whether the police officer said "Get up", or choked on his first word and (like FatFreeGoodness proposed) said “don’t GET UP!!”, the airman clarifies the police officer's instructions. The article says that the airman replied "I'm going to get up, all right?" and THEN started to get up. Whether the police officer choked on his words or not in the stressful situation, he's aware that he could have been misheard. If the airman has the foresight to clarify the policeman's command before complying, to avoid ambiguity, the police officer should take the opportunity to realize that he has been misinterpreted.

I doubt the police officer is an evil person, I think he must have succumbed to anxiety or pressure and lost control of himself. This is a terrible, terrible situation either way. I hope that full compensatory action is taken on behalf of the injured airman, and that the policeman is properly punished. In my uninformed opinion, attempted murder would be extreme because, like I said, I doubt the police officer had truly evil intentions. However, I think that he should certainly be charged with assault with a deadly weapon, conduct unbecoming... etc. etc. (don't know all the fancy legal phrases).

there is just no excuse for what he did. i hope hes thrown in prison with violent people that know he was a cop. The guy was shot before he was even standing up he was hardly even starting to get up. no reason at all to shoot him.

This has always been one of my fears.
That I'd be following a police officers orders, but get shot anyway.

:\

I hope the guy will pull through.

As much as I dislike these sorts of things, and cop/cop-related interactions for a myriad of reasons anyway, there's no reasonable way to claim that simply because a person says he's going to get up, in contradiction to a direct order, should mean that the person getting up heard right or is following directions.

Now it may very well be that the police officer told the guy to get up. but we have to ask ourselves whether officers generally, or even rarely, request suspects to get up off the ground. No, they tell them to get down, stop moving, or some variant of quit moving until I come over and move you myself. And most people who have had the unpleasant misfortune of being accosted by the police know this.

I suspect that this driver hasn't had that experience too often in his life, if ever. I don't know the hows or the whys of his involvement in a 100+ mph police pursuit, but I am confident that when the chase ended, the driver probably thought to himself that the gig was up. He'd stand up, dust himself off, and take his lumps (figureatively or literally, who knows) and be done with the stupidity of the situation he probably accidentally got himself into due to a stupid split second decision that he was laying there regretting. And he was almost positively laying there thinking about all this through a haze of pain and discomfort. So it's not unreasonable to think that he may or may not have heard the police officer at all, much less whether he said to do or do not get up. And it seems to me that someone in that situation would think to himself that he just needs to make his intentions clear: hey man, I'm just going to get up, ok? and think that's good nuff. because after all, he's one of the good guys, one of us, just a regular joe going about his business after a car accident.

But the cop doesn't know this. He could be a non-regular joe. He could be Clyde for all the cop knows or cares. So up comes the perp, and POP goes the gun. In about a second. Or, take out your trusty stopwatch and time yourself saying this as fast as you possibly can: How long do I have before he shoots me? or shorten it to "How long"

What's your watch say? How long did you have?
But all this happens fairly regularly in the region I live in. too often to be comfortable. anyone watching the news over here on a daily basis would know not to do what the driver did. that even if the cop does say, get the fuck up, you say, goddamn bro, I can't move. watch, I won't move a fucking finger until the ambulance comes.

so that's my input on the situation. what it really boils down to in my mind are a bunch of emotional responses to watching someone get shot. Someone we'd like to trust (war vet) being mishandled by someone we'd like to trust (the cop). but I suspect not a lot of people on this board have ever been on either end of a police gun.

It was the passenger that was shot, not the driver. It's pretty obvious, to me at least, that the victim/passenger was doing everything he could to comply with the officer's orders. He got up because he heard the officer tell him to get up, and he responded by repeating the order back to the officer. Remember that he's a law enforcement official (military police) himself, so he was trained for this type of confrontation.

He KNOWS the drill, knows the procedure and when you hear him telling the cop he's 'going to get up now', he's doing it and saying it because thats what he was told to do. There is no excuse for this cops behavior. Now imagine if the guy had been killed and this wasn't videotaped, what would we be hearing about it?

I don't see how it's relevant to correct me whether he was the driver or the passenger, but whatever.

You two are assuming he knows the drill and that assumption leads you to conclude that he must be following orders. The fact is that military police are not analogously trained as civilian police and he probably doesn't "know" the drill, but more than likely thinks he knows the drill, which is precisely my point.

Although on the face of it he doesn't appear to "know" the drill because as I described in my earlier post, the "drill" is you lay on your face until the police move you. In what situation do you think MP's operate in an analogous situation? In actual combat? or in guarding prisoners? In what realm of experience do you think an MP tells suspects to "get up" before securing the situation? Which is why I suspect that many of you have no actual experience with being accosted by the cops. In what universe do you think cops tells suspects to stand up after they've chased them down?

I also happen to have watched and listend to the actual video (which isn't in this thread, the link is commentary about what is being shown) because it ran on our local news numerous times before it hit national. hopefully someone will provide it and then we can resume talking about the 'facts'

My only point in the correction was to show that this isn't the guy that was running from the cops. He may or may not have been trying to get the driver to stop or he could very well have been egging him on. Given that he's in law enforcement, the standard will probably be for the former.

The "drill" is to do whatever the cop tells you. Sometimes cops order suspects to stand up, turn around and walk backwards towards them. There are multiple ways that PO's deal with suspects, and it all depends on the circumstances. If the cop was alone with a single suspect and needed to secure him quickly and didn't know if there was a weapon underneath his body, the easiest way to secure him might be to have him stand, turn around with hands laced and walk backwards where he can be cuffed and patted down. You're right that I've never been "accosted" by the cops, but I have enough friends on the force in Chicago to know that there are multiple ways in the manual to deal with varying circumstances. The ones that have seen the video that I've discussed this shooting with all say that the cop was in the wrong, although a couple of them think that the victim probably should have done a better job of idenifying himself as LE.

There was a report as soon as Webb's name was released that there had been a previous complaint about him. The sheriff's dept. there refuses to say anything about his record. They also took the video tape and arrested the video taper.

And the cop knew this how?
You're making points after the fact that the people in the situation had no knowledge about.
My post was speaking from the officer's perspective at the time.

Well, whatever man. This isn't going anywhere. I was just positing a different perspective that no one seems willing to entertain. It's just a plausible explanation, something to ponder on instead of lamenting the brutality of this loose cannon. I wasn't there and neither were you.
I never said the cop was in the right and he probably doesn't think he was either, in retrospect.

It's very easy to see how both of the actors in this situation thought they were doing the right thing at the time without too much difficulty or stretching of the information.

this guy is going to get nailed in court. let's look at it from both angles:

he told the guy to "get up" and then shot him when he got up. he is fucked. FUCKED!

second angle: he told the guy to "don't get up." then the guy tried to get up. then he unloaded on him. he is fucked, still. why?

because he didn't have any proof or reason that the guy was going for a gun! you are only supposed to "incapacitate" a person if you know they are getting ready to endanger their life. the guy wasn't going for his pocket (from what the video shows), didn't even get the guy any 'tude. he even said he was on his side! NOT TO MENTION, the officer could have kicked the guy or something when he tried to get up, not shoot him multiple times. he unloaded on the poor guy.

this is a simple case of "my adrenaline is rushing, I have a gun, I'm ancy, please don't move or I will shoot you accidently"

reminds me of the scene in goldeneye when orimov and his soldiers are watching James walk behind the big cart of explosive barrels. orimov tells none of them to shoot, the one soldier gets ancy and fires, orimov wastes the guy. same thing happened here, except no one was there to waste the officer.

There doesn't appear to by any doubt that the cop knew the victim was not the driver.

I heard SOMEONE say "get up" twice. The only justification I could see for the shooting would be if it was not Webb, the cop, who said it.

However, you also hear someone on the tape (identified on the news show I saw as "neighbor) saying, "Why'd you shoot him when you told him to get up?"

I'm anxious to hear what the witnesses say. Although they're doing their best to get rid of the taper, who had, I think, an outstanding warrant in another state.

Is that why hte taper was arrested? At least that makes some sense.