Free Republic

An investigation is underway after a Los Angeles police officer’s personal rifle accidentally fired a round in a parking garage earlier this week, officials announced. The May 9 incident occurred in the lower-level parking structure of the Compton Courthouse, located at 200 West Compton Boulevard, according to an LAPD news release. The officer, who has not been identified, was reportedly standing outside his patrol vehicle and was “manipulating his personally owned patrol rifle, when a Non-Tactical Unintentional Discharge occurred,” police said. Surrounded by concrete, the bullet ricocheted off the ceiling and struck the roof of the officer’s unoccupied patrol vehicle.

When a Syracuse man was struck last week by a bullet fired through the ceiling of his apartment, it marked the third time in eight years that an Onondaga County probation officer had unintentionally discharged one of the department-issued Glock pistols. Those three incidents, and similar cases in Central New York and elsewhere, come as no surprise to Joseph Cominolli. Cominolli was a Syracuse police sergeant in 1987 when he was assigned to find the best semiautomatic handgun to replace that department's revolvers. The hot new Glock pistol that other police agencies were then buying had two drawbacks that caused...