Posted on 10/07/2012 6:36:02 AM PDT by Uncle Chip
An NYPD officer yesterday shot and killed an unarmed Army reservist as he went to pick up a drill after they stopped his car.
Noel Polanco, 22, was fired at when he cut off the police car near New York's LaGuardia Airport, after they shouted at him to put his hands up, a witness said.
Passenger Diane DeFerrari insisted Mr Polanco never even took his hands off the wheel and the police had acted out of 'road rage.'
Tragedy: Noel Polanco, 22, was shot dead by a police officer as he drove two passengers home from the bar where he works
Horrified: Passenger Diane DeFerrari, who worked at the Ice Lounge bar with Mr Polanco, said he was not given a chance to put his hands up before police shot him
Officers who had given terrifying chase in an unmarked vehicle screamed, 'Put up your hands!', and then shot Mr Polanco a split-second later, she said.
'It was simultaneous,' she added. 'There was a pop and Noel gasped.'
After the shooting, Ms DeFerrari, 36, said she and a backseat passenger, an off-duty NYPD officer, were ordered out and told to put their hands on the car. 'The cop said, "Your friend just shot himself",' said Ms DeFerrari. 'I didn’t dispute what I saw because I was afraid. They wouldn’t let me look at him.'
The officer riding in Mr Polanco’s car, 29-year-old Vanessa Rodriguez, was waving her police ID out the window just before the shooting, sources said.
Detective Hassam Hamdy insisted he pulled the trigger after Mr Polanco, from Queens, reached down for something that turned out to be a yellow-and-black power drill, a source told the Daily News.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
You are delusional.
Enough — I surrender
You might want to dust off your dictionary and look up the word “context”.
It could be. Usually, when I hear hoof beats on a horse ranch in Arizona, I think horses and not zebras.
Now, they could have a zebra as a pet, or one could have escaped from a zoo, or any number of things, but odds are, it is going to be horse hooves.
There isn’t enough here to say otherwise. But then again, most of us at FR have learned long ago that you only get from the media that which they would like you to see, so there may be more behind it.
Of course,the British media wants to portray the USA as a country where innocent people who get stopped for cutting someone off get shot routinely by the very people who are supposed to be protecting them. That, of course, wouldn’t happen in THEIR enlightened country where neither the police nor the citizens can have firearms.
But you are correct, from the story, nobody knows, especially not the person who wrote it.
Is that located anywhere near the word “segue”?
Have you ever stopped quickly and had something on the seat beside you clunk onto the floor? It's almost a reflex to pick it back up and put it on the seat, especially if it's tangled up in your feet near the pedals.
I could easily imagine something like this happening and over-riding his attention to the sudden need to keep his hands showing in the hope the police weren't going to mistakenly shoot him.
These things happen and this looks so mob ~ so Taliban ~ so typical of a certain mind-set.
That was the bartender's account. And was he reaching for the drill or wasn't he? Were his hands on the wheel or not? Why do I feel like Eddie Murphy in the movie "Trading Places":
BILLY RAY VALENTINE: Beautiful. I suppose you'll give me this TV set for free?
MORTIMER DUKE: That's right.
BILLY RAY VALENTINE: Everything here is mine? I guess the stereo's mine too?
MORTIMER DUKE: Absolutely.
BILLY RAY VALENTINE: This is too much. I could really dig this. You know why? This happens to me every week.
Bottom line is this thing is so full of holes from every angle and both sides, as presented in this story, that we could simply make it up as we go along, and be able to draw just as many conclusions from it.
This has the same kind of stench as the story of the LAPD and the banker Brian Mulligan. At least the LAPD didn’t kill Mulligan.
Just beat the hell out of him.
This will be the key for the shooter and his union.He was reaching for a drill."Hey,all I know is that he was reaching for something and I feared that it could have been a firearm.When one is stopped like that they should know that they only move their hands when ordered to by the officer" would be the argument.
But who in God's name reaches for a *drill*? A firearm? Maybe.A knife? Maybe.Pepper spray? Maybe.Hammer? Maybe.But a *drill*? I'd be surprised if the guy did,in fact,reach for *anything*.
Perhaps. But if cops with “rifles” are threatening me, I am more inclined to make my hands visible than to put them in an unknown bag.
But that is me. They said he was an Army Reservist, they didn’t say he was smart or that he handled stress well.
My point is that we see this constantly even (or especially) here on FR: Cops shoot a person/dog/(insert something here) and regardless of what actually happened or how it is reported, there are people who will automatically castigate the police and people who will support the cops, no matter what.
The story from the UK has a particular agenda, we know that, we have seen it before. A stopped clock can be right twice a day, and zebras do end up on horse farms, but most of the time, we can only go on what we know.
It could be a dirty cop. It could be a bunch of cops willing to draw weapons in public because someone is sleeping with another cop’s woman, it could be any number of things. We don’t know any of that. None of it. But we have lots and lots of theories.
Best case scenario: If he then reached down to push the drill that had slid forward back under the seat, then the officer should still be surrendering his badge and prosecuted.
Before this is over the police union will have the driver attacking the officer with the drill.
That is the fly in the police ointment.
Detective Hassam Hamdy -
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d be taking a second look at this guy for more than a couple reasons.
“Is there a problem officers?”- Valentine
NY Slimes quote from Friday: “ 'We looked for a weapon, we didn’t find any; we found a drill,' he said in a news briefing at Police Headquarters. 'I’m not saying it played a role. I’m just saying we looked for a weapon. We did not find a weapon. The only thing we found was that drill.' ”
The same article says the drill was on the driver's side floor. No mention in that article of him reaching for the drill. I wonder if this Mail article was written by J.K. Rowling.
Guy shot himself. Cop said so. Case closed.
Was the detective in an unmarked car or one of the large rescue vehicles they drive? Was he in uniform? Detectives usually wear civilian clothes don't they? And why would someone who works in a department that has a Canine Unit, also functions as a Special Weapons and Tactical Unit (SWAT), and deals with hostage negotiations, be stopping someone for a traffic infraction? I'm not a cop hater, and worked in uniform in corrections for 25 years, so I'm well aware of the scumbags out there. I just have a problem with the fact that they bothered to stop the guy when people are always getting cut off in NY City traffic. I've driven there many times, and being cut off is a regular occurrence.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.