UPDATE: Now with scanner audio from that night. Most of it happens at the beginning, and you can tell the officer was clearly shaken.
[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmKHH4-ZOyc[/youtube]
SWAT a fly with a Bearcat? Does it look like it is driving on the sledding hill? (Image, Argus Leader Media)
This is a guest submittal;
The night of our recent police shooting was a glorious Sioux Falls winter evening. The weather was just right for some of us to be outside enjoying the crisp, calm night. There are people in the Midwest who enjoying walking on these types of evenings. There is a head clearing we are able to accomplish like at no other time of day or night. Its why we ski in bitter cold weather, it focuses our minds on what is important. It also brings to light the insanity of our recent police actions.
There is too much BS already involved in the Tuthill Park police shooting trying to justify the basic actions of police departments in the United States including ours. Militarization to protect and serve? Shooting first to ask the dead, Â questions later? Policing forces driving around in cars, SUVs and Bearcats as if in fear? They see a person walking down a street in a hoodie and shoot first. Why?
Our current policing policies are sick. At what point do we quit killing citizens, maiming them and destroying their property because we have unskilled, undereducated people expressing their small man insecurities while wearing a badge? SWAT driving onto a lawn with a Bearcat, blowing windows out of laundry room just to scare someone into submission? Destroying innocent people’s property because the policing forces are afraid to engage the person holed up behind a stranger’s washing machine? You know the a human being will eventually give up if the utilities are shut-off, it might take longer but no one or property will likely get hurt. It’s this basic.
To everyone trying to justify this random shooting into the dark, it is not a matter to be swept under the rug. Killing in Florida, Ferguson, Staten Island or Sioux Falls out of a perceived fear by a policing force is never right. It is the police who have caused their own fear. The current system creates the mistrust. Police or citizens shooting first because they are afraid? Bullshit. Who made the policing forces the judge, jury and executioner?
What if the random shooting into the dark hurt or killed a very innocent person driving by on Cliff Avenue. Does the person walking through Tuthill Park get charged with murder because the cop was afraid?
We Americans are not respecting our policing forces because they have not earned it. Fire departments earn our respect everyday by running into danger to save us. Our current policing departments demand our respect at the end of a gun barrel or Taser.
Peel’s Principles of Modern Law Enforcement
Written by Sir Robert Peel, when he established the Metropolitan London Police in 1829
1. The basic mission for which police exist is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to the repression of crime and disorder by military force and severity of legal punishment.
2. The ability of the police to perform their duties is dependent upon public approval of police existence, actions, behavior and the ability of the police to secure and maintain public respect.
3. The police must secure the willing cooperation of the public in voluntary observance of the law to be able to secure and maintain public respect.
4. The degree of cooperation of the public that can be secured diminishes, proportionately, to the necessity for the use of physical force and compulsion in achieving police objectives.
5. The police seek and preserve public favor, not by catering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to the law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws; by ready offering of individual service and friendship to all members of society without regard to their race or social standing, by ready exercise of courtesy and friendly good humor; and by ready offering of individual sacrifice in protecting and preserving life.
6. The police should use physical force to the extent necessary to secure observance of the law or to restore order only when the exercise of persuasion, advice and warning is found to be insufficient to achieve police objectives; and police should use only the minimum degree of physical force which is necessary on any particular occasion for achieving a police objective.
7. The police at all times should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police are the only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the intent of the community welfare.
8. The police should always direct their actions toward their functions and never appear to usurp the powers of the judiciary by avenging individuals or the state, or authoritatively judging guilt or punishing the guilty.
9. The test of police efficiency is the absence of crime and disorder, not the visible evidence of police action in dealing with them.