Oakland, Calif. police SWAT team
Posted on 03/23/2009 10:24:17 AM PDT by Drew68
When Oakland police Sgts. Ervin Romans and Daniel Sakai burst into an apartment on 74th Avenue on Saturday, they knew they were entering a dangerous situation. After all, they were looking for a man who had already killed two police officers.
What they didn't know was that the killer, Lovelle Mixon, had somehow gotten hold of an AK-47 assault rifle, police officials say. All they knew was that the gunman who had shot motorcycle officers Sgt. Mark Dunakin and Officer John Hege about two hours earlier used a handgun.
"Nobody knew he had an AK-47," said City Councilman Ignacio De La Fuente, who was among four council members to join Mayor Ron Dellums and acting Police Chief Howard Jordan for a late-night press conference Saturday.
The bulletproof vests that Romans and Sakai wore were no help - when Mixon fired his automatic rifle through a closet door in the apartment, he hit the two sergeants in the head.
The killings of four officers would devastate any police department. But it was especially traumatic for an Oakland force that has been beefed up in recent years with a lot of young, inexperienced cops.
"We've got a really young force out there, and this is really hitting them hard," officer Bob Valladon, former head of the Oakland Police Officers Association, said Sunday as he drove from one slain officer's home to another to meet with their families. "We've hired maybe 25o new cops in the past five years, so about a quarter of the force has never seen anything like this. No one has.
"These cops (who were killed) were veterans," Valladon said. "The best of the best."
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
“so exactly what would a SWAT team expect?”
They knew they had a guy who had already killed one or more fellow officers, and intent is as important as what kind of weapon he has.
This is just an attempt to distract attention from the fact that they’d released someone who obviously had not been “rehabilitated” enough.
A reasonable assumption, given the circumstances and outcome.
Adrenalin and fury may have outweighed patience and reason. SWAT cops are used to dominating the scene, and were in no mood to let this guy control the situation.
But even if he could peer out of the door, the officers would have been moving, so he would have been sitting on the floor, in a cramped closet, and he manages to site the gun around the obstacle of the door, and in all the emotion/adrenaline-laced panic of the situation, he was able to land fatal head shots - not once, but twice?
Presumably after he hits the first officer, the second officer is high-tailing it for his life.
I just don't see the mechanics of this situation - it's just astronomically unlikely that he could have pulled this off as described.
I wonder if some reporter watched Ed Harris's character in Enemy at the Gates and just lazily assumed that you can actually do stuff like that in real life and so the reporter invented a bunch of B.S. and tried to pass it off as fact.
Or else something really weird is going on here.
“Nobody expects an AK-47.”
No, no. It’s the Spanish Inquisition that no one expects...
:)
Oakland, Calif. police SWAT team
I think you can take some of the force and redirect it ala ACP type recoil / rearm mechanism. For instance, when shooting a .357 mag (also shoots .38spl) it has a much more massive recoil even when shooting .38 rounds than does my .45 ACP semi auto. The recoil energy is used to rearm for the next shot (it pushes back the slide automatically using the gas in the firing chamber that is expelled when a round is discharged - at least that’s how I understand it).
That system has been taken a step further with the compensated models where there are exhaust ports on the top of the slide as well to reduce the recoil for even tighter control under rapid fire conditions.
There are several recoil minimizing designs in use today that drastically change “what you feel” at the butt/stock end or grip end of a gun. There is a system used for RPG launchers as well (I believe they use a wall of water somehow), but that isn’t specifically designed for recoil reduction - it is more for surrounding troops’ safety IIRC.
Bottom line, the majority of the energy comes out the business end of the gun (it takes the easy way out as all energy will), the rest is absorbed into the much larger mass of the gun itself.
I am by no means a physics expert, this just seems to track with my experience.
Anyone got a photo of the perp? All I could find are pixs of his home-sustahs and grand-mammy (bet she raised him).
Flashbangs were used during the entry.
Here’s the mistake many of the commenters are making, and it’s no suprise, it happens all the time when people are trying to reconstruct use of force incidents. They’re asking questions based on what they know now, rather than confining themselves to the knowledge that the officers had at the time. They are then making woulda, coulda, shoulda judgments based on a scenario that doesn’t accurately match the incident.
For example, they’re assuming the police knew (without question) that the guy was in the place. What they actually knew was that they’d gotten a call from an unidentified informant claiming he was in the place. During the North Hollywood shootout, there were five different reports of suspects on rooftops, holing-up in apartments, taking over a restaurant, and running through a neighborhood. All of them were false.
What they also probably knew from the landlord is that the occupant of the apartment was a young woman and her two children. And, they knew that they couldn’t get any response from the apartment. And, they knew that the layout of the building was such that they couldn’t evacuate the neighbors. And they knew (remember the SLA shootout?) that when you go launching gas cannisters into a structure they frequently cause fires.
Now, there’s a whole lot of scenarios you have to weigh, based on how little you know. What happens if you burn the apartment house down or you gas everybody in the place and it turns out the unknown informant was wrong? What happens if you begin a leisurely entry to the place and the guy is in there, has hostages, and kills them? And there’s about another dozen possibilities. The second-guessers don’t want to consider all those possibilities because they “know” they weren’t going to happen. That’s a luxury the officers didn’t have at the time.
The first step to making a careful analysis of the incident is to confine yourself to the facts as they were known at the instant it happened. That’s almost impossible for the average individual to do, but it’s an important part of getting an accurate picture of the real circumstances in which the decision was made.
Note: this is a general discussion of the kind of things that impact the task of accurately re-creating this sort of incident, your comment just provided a convenient point to launch into it. It’s not aimed at you.
The Oakland parolee who took the lives of four Oakland police officers knew he was a wanted man and deliberately skipped out on a meeting as part of a feud he was having with his parole agent, his family said today.
“He’s not a monster,” said his sister, 24-year-old Enjoli Mixon, whose apartment on 74th Avenue was where Mixon was slain in a gun battle with police that left two Oakland SWAT officers dead. “I don’t want people to think he’s a monster. He’s just not. He’s just not.”
Lovelle Mixon was on parole arising from an offense in San Francisco. Mixon was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon stemming from an armed robbery in San Francisco, the family members said. He initially served six years, and then served another nine months after violating his parole when he got out.
His family said that while he was in Corcoran state prison, Mixon married his childhood girlfriend, Amora Langston, and worked briefly as a janitor for a low-income housing provider in Hayward once he got out two years ago.
He was most recently released from prison in November, his family said.
******
YES, HE WAS A MONSTER!!!
Enjoli Mixon (left), Sharnell Mixon, Reynete Mixon and Tameaka Mikon, relatives of Lovelle Mixon, gathered to remember and talk about him
So did they apprehend the perp after the closet shooting?
Registration wouldn’t have been much help. His permanent address was with mom. That’s not where he was. It seems unlikely that he’d have notified DMV that he’d decided to move because he was hiding from his parole officer.
It's a zero-sum game, though.
To give the projectile some "oomph" in direction X, then either you [as the shooter] need to receive an equal amount of "oomph" in direction -X, or else there needs to be some excess heat somewhere.
There just isn't going to be any "oomph" magically appearing out of thin air.
DMV:
“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t accept your change of address because you’ve filed it on form 20215 “Report of address change by wanted felon”, when it should have been filed on 20216, “Report of address change by convicted felon hiding from probation officer”.
Oh, good. Somebody finally got it.
Huh? Of course it would have if it were registered to the suspect.
It would have told the responding officers who the hell the vehicle belonged to.
That is why I stated:
In addition, I heard the suspect left the traffic stop on foot, running from the scene. It would seem likely that his registration was ran, and they quickly determined his last reported address, and all the info from his parole officer in regards to family friends contacts, locations etc.
You realize that he was located at his sisters apartment?
That information would absolutely be in the system. In addition, his parole officer as well would have that information.
They may be available in a diffrent variant but I knew I saw news about a SKS surrender story. That being said I can see there being more pressure for ammo restrictions starting with 7.62x39 even though that won't make sense. It will make the Brady Bunch et al “feel better”
Sappy plate?
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