Posted on 09/10/2010 6:47:27 PM PDT by The Magical Mischief Tour
The Los Angeles police officer who fatally shot a day laborer in Westlake was previously accused in a civil lawsuit of improperly using deadly force when he shot and wounded a 19-year-old in the leg in 2008, The Times has learned.
Officer Frank Hernandez shot Joseph Wolf on the morning of Dec. 12, 2008, according to a civil rights and negligence lawsuit filed in March of this year by Wolf’s attorneys.
The lawsuit said Wolf was shot outside his home after he heard the sound of a helicopter circling above his home and went outside to see what was going on.
An LAPD account released at the time stated that Hernandez and a partner were helping to search for assault suspects in the LAPD's Rampart Division when they approached a man they suspected of being involved in the assault.
The man tried to flee, then pointed a gun at the officers, prompting Hernandez to shoot the man once and wound him, according to the account. Wolf was not the suspect the officers were looking for, according to the LAPD statement.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimesblogs.latimes.com ...
Love it. You seem to be on your usual anti-cop rampage today. Post after post .... great stuff. Can’t wait for the next one. LOL!
Sounds like this Officer needed some range time and did better on the second try. Anyone who points a gun at a police officer deserves a bullet.
And the truth is __________________________?
I can’t think of a faster way to get yourself shot
than to point a gun at an armed police officer.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I’m growing increasingly tired of the anti-law enforcement sentiment on this forum sometimes. They are singled out like pit bulls as if they provide no positives to the communities they serve.
That’s my take.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
big whoop. I’ve been accused of being a racist due to my opposition to Obama.
Yes cops use excessive force, but this does not appear, in any way, shape or form, to be one of those cases.
It’s Magical Mischief Tours raison d’etre.
I suggested he post stories about cops saving lives and keeping people from injury and defending property, too, but so far he has not taken me up on my offer.
I wonder who he calls in an emergency. Perhaps he is completely self-reliant.
I spent a few years tripping over broken porches, walking into meth labs, and wrestling weapons or drugs out of the hands of douchebags. But that doesn’t matter...
Thank you for your service and sacrifice in keeping me and my family safe.
Some soldiers are bad, some cops are bad, some judges are bad, some teachers are bad, some parents are bad. . .
And they are all in positions of authority.
But myself I am grateful to have soldiers, cops, judges and teachers. And parents. Because they are totally necessary and most of them are good people.
Magical Mischief Tour could highlight the good along with the bad, helping bring encouragement to the good guys instead of just attacking the bad (and sometimes the good along with them, as I think he is doing in this case).
But he seems to believe that undermining and insinuating is the order of the day.
Its the order of the day. I’d take taser over pepper spray any day... I’ve experienced both.
What the cops did to the old guy was wrong. What the taser does to assist in non-deadly situations, is unremarkable.
The taser is an excellant intermediate weapon that people don’t take into accoint(no stats) for the times is was withdrawn and never used to diffuse a potentially bad situation.
Funny how freepers support personal “RIGHTS” and support building an arsenel. I think for the most part, cops are doing the right thing and serve an unmeasurable deterrant effect that most citizens don’t recognize$
Unless the police fabricated the story to justify an unlawful police shooting of the guy. The charges laid by the police against the man they shot were dismissed in court.
It’s going to civil court now for unlawful force. With how some police have been out of control lately and killing and abusing people, and getting away with it, I can’t make assumptions about their honesty anymore.
It matters. What is going on with the breakdown of discipline in police ranks is a small minority wreaking havoc. It has nothing to do with most officers who are honorable and much apprecited for their professionalism and integrity.
You wouldn’t have cooperated with the police abuse or harassment power trips we are seeing in some cops today. Something is going haywire and I would rather honest cops like you fix it w/o puting the profession in danger than permit Jesse race card Jackson and gangs capitalize on it.
“Something is going haywire”
No, it really isn’t. There’s just a lot of posting about police abuse issues on FR If this is your only source of news, your perception is that brutality has gone haywire. If anything is going haywire, its the craziness of this country’s citizenry.
I read a lot of sources for news; not just Free Republic. That is what worries me. The abuse and corruption incidents have become wide spread in reporting and public awarness.
It is going to be addressed by the public and it is important to me that police professionals with integrity do that instead of angry victims, “community organizers” and their rioters.
I know you are angry at the guy who posts these reports on FR but I think he is doing conservative leaders a favor in the form of giving a heads up on what is happening around the country with this issue. We either lead in solving this problem in the public perception or deal with a reaction to liberalism’s aftermath. To me police are in more danger when professionals with common sense and integrity do nothing and deny there is a problem or name the people who are complaining the problem.
I will share a personal experience with you. I am about as goody two shoes conservative as soles come and we had a frightening police raid at our house based on a noise complaint made by a neighbor at 9:45pm. It was a party we threw for four families - an annual summer event - a pool party and yard games on five acres. We only got the rading cops to back off because one of the dads is a lawyer and he put his game on.
Our town’s council apparently decided we had a problem with teens drinking and this is the way the police reacted - to raid every party they found in the town as if they were breaking up a teen drinking party and locking down the area to catch teens who might flee or escape the raid.
Anyway, to make a long story short, after too many confrontational raids, our towns people decided the police department had become a danger to the residents and they cut the police department by 2/3, destroyed their tasers and comtemplated disarming them altogether but in the end allowed the remaining officers to have guns unless they screwed up again. We did not really have crime in our town anyway and this build up of police came with the fear of terrorism (like Russian school terrorist nightmares) and it’s training.
Leading up to that, the police department could have altered their strategy and saved themselves a lot of trouble had they listened to complaints like ours. The problem in our community was not ALL celebrations in town. The problem was unsupervised teen drinking parties; most of which we learned were taking place in the conservation land at the edge of town. No one was terrorists.
All the cops had to do was when they saw 8 parents and a bunch of kids playing is inform me they got a noise complaint, be sweet and respectful to me as I was to them, and then leave my property with the cup of cider and burger I offered to them. They had absolutely no respect for me; only the lawyer dad who stepped up and told them they were about to get sued to kingdom come if they did not cut their loses and get off the property immediately. They respected him and only him.
If he had not been there, I don’t know what would have happened to us. They were barking at me like I was a criminal hiding drunk kiddos in my yard and my husband and other moms and dads were capping a flood of anger and instinct to protect me and the kids and I could sense that and I felt an urgency to do whatever I could to keep control of the situtation...but I had no control even though I have a lot of skills in de-esclating situations like this. Nothing worked to shift the aggression of these extremly ignorant young cops except the threats of a lawyer in town. Thank God he was there.
I am certain we could have all been criminals before they left our property had things gone differently. When I hear people charged with obstruction of justice or resisting arrest now, I wonder if nutty cops on power trips made it happen as they almost did at my house. That never occured to me before. But you need to know that I am not the only one and if it could happen to our family, it could happen to people in your family. I wish you had been there!
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