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Well, that's encouraging
Posted by David Hardy · 4 December 2014 03:32 PM
Cleveland PD officer fatally shoots a 12 year old who is holding an airsoft gun. Now it appears that Cleveland hired him after another PD asked for his resignation, based on his emotional instability on the firing range.
"During a training episode at a firing range, Loehmann was reported to be "distracted and weepy" and incommunicative. "His handgun performance was dismal," deputy chief Jim Polak of the Independence, Ohio, police department wrote in an internal memo."
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So, who's in charge in Cleveland? Oh.. Well, that explains it..
Yet it's amazing that when told of an unknown subject pointing a pistol at citizens (The officers were not warned that it was a child, or that there was a suspicion that the firearm was a toy) the officer was able to stop a very bad situation in spite of all the negative things that were said about him by that other officer.
Remember, this happened the same day that the world expected the Ferguson grand jury to start off WWIII for cops during a year that has seen multiple ambush attacks on police officers. He was told that someone was pointing a firearm at innocent people.
Yes, the shooting was virtually the moment he stepped out of the car, but from the video you can see that the child was drawing the firearm at that time too.
He may have had issues with a previous department. He may have been inexperienced. He may have been lots of things, but after looking at the video and hearing what he was told over the radio: 100 out of 100 times, I would take the exact same shot at the exact same moment if given the same facts to work from.
Had the car pulled up another 3 feet, I'd have rushed the kid and tackled him, but that would have been a horrible idea from his position as getting around the open door would have taken too much time for a quick hit.
Had the car stopped shorter, I'd have gotten out and taken cover while ordering the child to the ground. But the distance from the door to the back of the car was too long for such a short distance to the kid who was already drawing a firearm.
With the car stopped where it was stopped, the only choice was to attack or wait for the subject to attack. At the time of the shooting, the toy firearm was not known to be a toy and should not be thought of now as a toy. That sort of hindsight is unfair to the officer who believed that his life was in danger.
As a veteran who has seen similar situations (kicking in a door and seeing someone pick up an object that looked like a firearm, in a manner that looked like someone picking up a firearm and putting it to their shoulder like a firearm.), I understand that while the child did not pose an actual threat to the officer, his life depended on him not taking the time to find out if it was an actual threat and treating a logical threat as if it were an actual threat.