Posted on 01/08/2003 10:02:50 PM PST by spetznaz
COOKEVILLE, Tennessee (CNN) -- Police video released Wednesday showed a North Carolina family kneeling and handcuffed, who shrieked as officers killed their dog -- which appeared to be playfully wagging its tail -- with a shotgun during a traffic stop.
The Smoak family was pulled over the evening of January 1 on Interstate 40 in eastern Tennessee by officers who mistakenly suspected them of a carjacking. An investigation showed James Smoak had simply left his wallet on the roof of his car at a gas station, and motorists who saw his money fly off the car as he drove away called police.
The family was driving through eastern Tennessee on their way home from a New Year's trip to Nashville. They told CNN they are in the process of retaining a lawyer and considering legal action against the Cookeville, Tennessee, Police Department and the Tennessee Highway Patrol for what happened to them and their dog.
In the video, released by the THP, officers are heard ordering the family, one by one, to get out of their car with their hands up. James Smoak and his wife, Pamela, and 17-year-old son Brandon are ordered onto their knees and handcuffed.
"What did I do?" James Smoak asks the officers.
"Sir, inside information is that you was involved in some type of robbery in Davidson County," the unidentified officer says.
Smoak and his wife protest incredulously, telling the officers that they are from South Carolina and that their mother and father-in-law are traveling in another car alongside them.
The Smoaks told CNN that as they knelt, handcuffed, they pleaded with officers to close the doors of their car so their two dogs would not escape, but the officers did not heed them.
Pamela Smoak is seen on the tape looking up at an officer, telling him slowly, "That dog is not mean. He won't hurt you."
Her husband says, "I got a dog in the car. I don't want him to jump out."
The tape then shows the Smoak's medium-size brown dog romping on the shoulder of the Interstate, its tail wagging. As the family yells, the dog, named Patton, first heads away from the road, then quickly circles back toward the family.
An officer in a blue uniform aims his shotgun at the dog and fires at its head, killing it immediately.
For several moments, all that is audible are shrieks as the family reacts to the shooting. James Smoak even stands up, but officers pull him back down.
"Y'all shot my dog! Y'all shot my dog!" James Smoak cries. "Oh my God! God Almighty!"
"You shot my dog!" screams his wife, distraught and still handcuffed. "Why'd you kill our dog?"
"Jesus, tell me, why did y'all shoot my dog?" James Smoak says.
The officers bring him to the patrol car, and the family calms down, but still they ask the officers for an explanation. One of them says Patton was "going after" the officer.
"No he wasn't, man," James Smoak says. "Y'all didn't have to kill the dog like that."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...
"libertarian lynch mob" LOL.
You obviously have issues with Libertarians which you wish to vent. Taking up any cause in effort to do so is apparently not beneath you, even if it means defending a trigger happy cop. Do you have any shame?
I never once defended this cop. See post 60 I said he should be fired and brought up on charges. Save your strawman lies for someone else.
I agree.
I don't see how that would be anarchy.
Of course it wouldn't.
But What WOULD be anarachy, is what some here have suggested, that we should do away with all police altogether. That all cops are corrupt. That cop misconduct is on the rise (a pharse right out of Al Sharpton's mouth) but put no proof out to support such a statement.
Let's face it when pseudo cons, libertarians, whatever sound like Al Sharpton then they should be treated like him.
This may have been an example of police misconduct, or it may not have been. Neither libertarians nor law and order advocates should come to a conclusion until the facts are presented.
Additionally, law enforcement officers are not born on another planet, but come from the rank and file of the citizenry. Their behavior is reflective of the overall society and culture. When moral values are not observed or regarded as relative, discipline at home and school is lacking, education is replaced by liberal indoctrination, and decency is flouted, as is too often the case in modern America, the young people that are products of this system will likely be advocates of situation ethics and attracted to both a "might makes right" outlook and an attitude that "it's OK to lie if it furthers your cause." If police are both more cowardly in the face of violence and more brutal toward civilians than their counterparts of, say, 30 years ago, it is because of their prevailing culture and its influence on police officers.
That being said, there is another, potentially dangerous side effect of the increased alienation on the part of the conservative or libertarian "remnant" in the white American middle and working classes toward all government, Federal, state and local. The conservatives of the 1950s through the 1970s may have disliked the welfare and social services side of government, but strongly supported the law enforcement and national defense side. Look at the "Support Your Local Police" campaigns of that era, and how Spiro Agnew, a former Rockefeller Republican, assumed conservative coloring merely by denouncing anti-government hippies and antiwar protestors. Today, homeschoolers, fundamentalist Christians, small businessmen, farmers, and others deemed politically incorrect perceive themselves as being subject to a 21st Century version of COINTELPRO and would not respond favorably to a Spiro Agnew or a George Wallace calling for tougher police measures.
The United States is not a separate universe. This country's interests are immediately threatened by Muslim extremists and their allies in Middle Eastern capitals, as well as by a poorly controlled flow of illegal aliens, mostly from Latin America. Furthermore, China looms as a rival superpower, North Korea is exteremly dangeroous. Two major Latin American nations, Venesuela and Brazil, are under Marxist rule. The white middle and working classes have been the foundation of American society and the chief pool for the nation's armed forces since the founding of the Republic. If those classes, especially the conservative/libertarian remnant, are so anti-government that they will not support law enforcement internally and the armed forces externally, the long term future of our nation is in jeopardy.
I also contend, from YEARS of first hand knowledge, that they are, for the most part, not the kind of people you would want to pal around with.
That's one of the reasons for my reply to you.
I don't think that people who say that speak for all or even most libertarians.
I know that they certainly don't speak for me.
That's one of the puzzling things about your posts.
On one hand you attack people (rightly so) for claiming that all cops are bad.
Yet you make similar claims about libertarians.
Seems to me that if one broad generalization is a fallacy, then so is the other.
2) Even if i ignore your previous premise (that it is 'just a dog') that still leaves the fact that the cops acted unprofessionally. Even a couple of freeper cops (and freepers with kids who are cops) have said the way the Tn boys in blue acted in that case was not only callous but worthy of a severe reprimand! You do nto go with shotguns blazing unless the situation warrants it ....and according to freeper cops that situation did not! Moreover (even if they had not shot the dog) the manner in which they treated the family was despicable.
All in all what those cops did is just wrong .....and i am sure (and i hope) that the family in question gets a hold of one of those slick lawyers and makes the TN police department bleed! Sadly it will be the taxpayers that will feel the pinch (although i am sure there must be a way of suing those particular officers directly) ....however i doubt TN cops will ever go gung-ho shotguns ablazing just because some lady called them on the cellphone saying money was flying out of a car window!
Usually i think litigation is taken too far ....however if the family manages to sue those cops 'til kingdom come then i will be exceedingly glad!
You're right I apologize for that.
BTW since you have no profile may I ask where you're from and have you spent your entire life in a big city?
what terrible sentence structure
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