Most 14 year old boys upon seeing their mother in an altercation would jump into the fray.
I can't believe that a fully armed police officer with gun, taser, night stick, hand cuffs, and especially the extensive training would feel unduly threatened by a 14 year old unarmed boy. I guess there wasn't a dog to shoot.
PS the article doesn't say whether the boy got back in the van when she sped off. If the officers kept possession of the boy, they would at least have someone to do the colonoscopyies on.
Most 14 year old boys I knew didn’t have mothers who disobeyed police and drive away from a legal stop.
Why should the cop assume the boy is unarmed? He got out of the car and went at the officer. The boy is as big as the cop.
The kid got back in the car, sans colonoscopy.
That was my thought too, and he was not large for his age. Be very afraid. Good Lord, most mothers have taken something like that from their own 14 yr old sons. I have and both of mine are Eagle Scouts. And then they had to punish him with an arrest. Sad.
If I had seen my mother fighting a cop over a speeding ticket I would have wondered what the hell was wrong with her and would have tried to calm her down. The 14 year old believed that this WASNT going to be a standard moving violation, he suspected that this was more serious with far worse consequences. It isn't uncommon for drug abusers/dealers and criminals of various sorts to include children in their activities especially if they are part of the gangsta culture. This kid knew something.
At 14 I would have been fully capable of killing an adult, especially a distracted one. The cop had no way of knowing if that kid was carrying anything especially after having sent the kid back into the vehicle where he could have acquired a weapon. If, as a 14 year old, I had been motivated to go after a cop I would have understood that I was doing it under threat of potentially being shot and would have made sure I was armed. When the kid got out the second time the cop should have sticked or tased that kid.
By this point in time the cop should have fully expected that this was not a standard traffic stop. Moms in minivans full of kids do not evade a speeding ticket by going on high speed chases in oncoming traffic. He should have suspected at the very least that she had serious mental or medical problems that required her to be stopped then and there. We cant see what the mother is doing at the second stop but, it sounds like there is a struggle when the cop tried to get her out. Having fled, he should have suspected that she may be armed or have something concealed within immediate reach. When he could not pull her out, he should have tased or sprayed her.
Had he taken any of these justified steps then others in the community would not have had their lives unduly threatened when she fled again. No backup would have even been required except to search the mom when hauling her off.
As to the cop who shot at the vehicle, he is clearly aiming at the driver side rear tire. Not justifiable knowing that the car is full of kids. The angle he fires from endangers innocent vehicles potentially approaching from the oncoming lane. There is no evidence that the pipe sticking out of the back of the vehicle is a full auto dog firing cannon. This 3rd cop needs to have action taken against him.
In the video we can see the boy, and his younger sisters who also jump out, get back in the vehicle. At the end we see cop 3(?) hauling of the boy in cuffs. Another poster has commented that the kid looks small and he is compared to cop1 and mom. If we look for objects to get an idea of scale, like the minivan, we see that cop1 is a man of some size and mom is rather tall but boy is comparable in size to cop3 and should be considered as potentially dangerous to adults.