Posted on 12/16/2013 9:14:42 PM PST by BenLurkin
LOS ANGELES (CBSLA.com) — Family members claim LAPD officers did not need to open fire on Brian Beaird, a disabled veteran who was killed in Downtown LA Friday after leading police on a high-speed pursuit.
Police Chief Charlie Beck spoke about the investigation Monday and insisted events that night may have appeared more threatening from an officer’s perspective.
“I reserve judgment. You know, I’ve been doing this a long time and you have to know what’s in the minds of the officers, you have to know what they know,” Beck said. “You have to remember that whatever you’re seeing is not the point of view of the officers; it’s very different to see something from 1,200 feet, from a helicopter, rather than 15 feet away in the dust and the noise.”
Beaird, allegedly drunk, led police on an hour-long pursuit before crashing his silver Corvette into another vehicle and a fire hydrant. The collision occurred near the intersection of Olympic Boulevard and Los Angeles Street.
He reportedly tried to exit his car and was shot by officers.
A law enforcement source told CBS2/KCAL9 reporter Dave Lopez that when Beaird got out of the car an officer shot him with a bean bag without alerting the other officers. The other officers allegedly heard that and mistook it as a gunshot coming from Beaird, prompting them to open fire. “Right now that kind of stuff is speculation. Now, speculation isn’t always wrong, but I’m not going to confirm any of that, and we’re going to work through this,” Beck said.
“…Does it happen very often that a bean bag is fired and that triggers that,” Lopez said to Beck.
“I’m speaking very generally here: We have absolute protocols to prevent that. Before an officer discharges a bean bag the protocol is for them to loudly state, ‘Bean bag ready. Bean bag ready,’ so that everybody knows that the detonation they hear is not a gunshot,” Beck said.
The big question is whether the first officer yelled “bean bag” before firing.
“We’re pretty angry. It didn’t seem that there was justification for what happened,” said Beaird’s brother John in a phone interview.
He said his brother called during the pursuit and said he couldn’t understand why the police were after him.
Beck says there will be a full investigation: “These things take some amount of time and we work through them very thoroughly.”
In the meantime, the officers involved in the shooting have been reassigned to desk duty.
I think I counted a dozen Cop Cars right after the Corvette hit the other car.
Imagine if the Corvette driver was one of Obama’s Sons instead of a Creepy Cracka. This would be the above the fold Headline in the NYT.
And the rioting would have already begun in Watts. Because the ONLY reason the cops would ever shoot a suspect is RACISM!
This situation is VERY different from Rodney King.
The shot person is a white military veteran. Possibly a registered Republican.
So the bean bag is "detonated" out of the shotgun, but it's NOT shot out?
Maybe it's sent out the end of a giant Blowgun- yeah that's the ticket...
You left out, “If he had never been born.”
Just curious. Who was that?
Pack syndrome.
One guy fires and they all think they have to unload.
I watched the video and I didn’t see a high speed chase.
Looked to me like the guy just wouldn’t stop.
Of course the video was kind of limited.
But how many police officers do we need in a pursuit anyway?
Does a pursuit mean that every officer within a hundred miles has to get involved in it?
Alaska Wolf, I presume.
For years blacks complained about being gunned down like this white guy was — and whites had no sympathy for them.
Now that LEOs are shooting whites the way they shot blacks for years — maybe the scales will fall from white eyes.
Thank God us normal citizens don't just open fire indiscriminately when we hear what sounds like a gunshot. Oh, right. We'd go to jail for that. If you're firing a gun at someone doesn't it make a little bit of sense to actually look at what you're firing at? If you see no gun, shouldn't that make you hesitate a little?
I’m sure there’s a video or an app or something.:-0
It’s difficult to say at the exact time of the collision, but at about the 21:00 mark, it clearly shows the light red for the vet’s direction of travel.
“This may be pre-planned, premeditated murder.”
Or smart police tactics. Let’s not forget that one.
What was most annoying in watching the video were the embellishments by the news people. I did not see what I would expect in a “high speed” chase. I saw possible speeding on the streets, maybe 50 in a 35, 45 in a 25, etc., kind of stuff. But there were moments of red-light running, near misses, enough to injure others to the extent he needed to be shutdown.
Yes. As I noted, at 20:55 you can see a green light in the vette’s direction of travel, I also note that you can see the signal turn yellow.
Guess what happens next?
See post #37, re-watch the video, and get back to us, m’kay?
He got shutdown all right.
The “trap” you are falling into with most of these bloggers is to bring in the crash victim(s). They do not want to consider this in the totality of the circumstances. They want to isolate everything from the final act of shooting the driver. So you will be forever facing that here, as occurred on other threads about this.
You are correct.
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