Replies

"If I can be charged with a crime that was done by accident so should the police. Two sets of laws are not acceptable."

First off, I am not defending the cop here.

However, I would like to point out that my friends father admitted to the family shortly before his passing that he mistook an American patrol for enemy combatants on one of the islands during WWII and open fired, killing a brother marine and wounding another. It was termed "the fog of war" and he lived with that guilt his entire life, but was never charged as a crime. I bet this cop is torn up inside and will never forgive himself for doing this after seeing that baby in a pool of blood, but I think that the higher ups who expected him to do what he did and made it their SOP is really who should be held accountable.

Now granted in small town America it's not a war zone, but in places like Detroit and Chicago it sure as hell isn't like it was a while ago either.

30 years ago I was going to be a reserve police officer, my parents talked me out of it because it would conflict with our business. Now I wouldn't be a cop and have to deal with the kind of people you have to day in and day out for all the tea in China.

“”””If I can be charged with a crime that was done by accident so should the police. Two sets of laws are not acceptable.”
First off, I am not defending the cop here.

However, I would like to point out that my friends father admitted to the family shortly before his passing that he mistook an American patrol for enemy combatants on one of the islands during WWII and open fired, killing a brother marine and wounding another. It was termed “the fog of war” and he lived with that guilt his entire life, but was never charged as a crime. I bet this cop is torn up inside and will never forgive himself for doing this after seeing that baby in a pool of blood, but I think that the higher ups who expected him to do what he did and made it their SOP is really who should be held accountable.

Now granted in small town America it’s not a war zone, but in places like Detroit and Chicago it sure as hell isn’t like it was a while ago either.

30 years ago I was going to be a reserve police officer, my parents talked me out of it because it would conflict with our business. Now I wouldn’t be a cop and have to deal with the kind of people you have to day in and day out for all the tea in China. “””

The military and the police are two different things. In war you have people whose sole intent is to kill you. We don’t have this in the USA,. If we do, show me a case where the police are under constant attack.

It is no excuse for the police not to know if the person being sought was or was not there. Just like our court system is set up so that it is better to let a criminal go than imprison a innocent person so should be the reasoning with this. IE it is better to let one criminal go than hurt a innocent. This fact is lost with the current police forces in many cities. True police work is set on protecting the innocent people dictating that you know who is present when you attack to protect the people you are charged with protecting. There is no excuse to break the door down without doing proper investigation first.

This case just shows that the police force here was more concerned with protecting their officers than protecting the people they claim to be protecting.

The one point you are missing in holding the individual officer accountable for implementing the DPT SOP is this:

Nobody was ever forced to be a cop. Never. It is a voluntary act to go to cop school. I have always wondered how they find people willing to do the job, but they always find people who will do it.

Now me, I could not get up every day, put on a uniform and spend my days and nights harassing Grandma for a burned out turn signal, or in this case doing no-knock raids. I couldn’t do it. No way. I couldn’t hide behind a billboard on a Saturday afternoon and make traffic stops on people going to little league games for “improper left turns” or whatever they can dream up. I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t work a highway interdiction task force and seize vehicles and cash without recourse on the flimsy premise that if you carry cash you are guilty of running drugs. I couldn’t do the job. But plenty of people will do the job.

They should be confronted personally for their choices. Cops don’t like that and hide behind departmental policy. I know, because I have had the conversation. It takes balls to confront a cop personally and it is dangerous. They get angry.

But cops choose to be cops. Cops choose to do the job.