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All this for a teenager smoking pot? :roll: :roll:
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/437672p-368722c.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/437672p-368722c.html
You have got to be joking...26 bullets? 26?Maren Bell said:All this for a teenager smoking pot? :roll: :roll:
http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/437672p-368722c.html
Since this suspect was named we can safely assume that he's at least 18. Let's not forget that he's the one who kicked the door open releasing the dog to bite the officer. He escalated this situation when he ran and loosed the pit bull on the officers.Maren Bell said:All this for a teenager smoking pot?
How many do you think it should have taken?Stacia Porter said:You have got to be joking...26 bullets? 26?
He ran from his apartment to another one on the same floor. There's no indication that the officers knew whose apartment this was. They didn't know if it belonged to a friend, a crime partner or some innocent person whom Acevedo was going to take hostage.Stacia Porter said:They were after a teenager who had smoked pot
Exactly. So officers fire multiple weapons at a dog (hitting one another) risking ricochet into the apartment they have yet to enter...they could have hit the child, or anyone else who happened to be there. And why do I not think it takes 26 bullets to kill a dog? It doesnt' take 26 to kill a man...or did these police officers fail marksmanship?Lou Castle said:[
He ran from his apartment to another one on the same floor. There's no indication that the officers knew whose apartment this was. They didn't know if it belonged to a friend, a crime partner or some innocent person whom Acevedo was going to take hostage.
It's always interesting when someone, from the comfort and safety of their living room, with 20-20 hindsight, can tell exactly how best police officers operating under the stress of a rapidly unfolding, potentially deadly situation, should have handled it.Stacia Porter said:And why do I not think it takes 26 bullets to kill a dog? It doesnt' take 26 to kill a man...or did these police officers fail marksmanship?
No spin is necessary. I wonder how many times you've found yourself in such a potentially life threatening situation such as this one? Police rightfully should keep shooting until the threat against them has been stopped. If that can be done with one round, great. If it takes 26, that's what it takes.Stacia Porter said:No matter how you spin this, it's overdone.
Many are but I'd match the average cop against the average JQ Public any day.Jeff Oehlsen said:What, you forget that most cops are doofs?
This ranks pretty high on list of the "stupid comments" I've heard people make.Jeff Oehlsen said:C'mon, I thought 26 shots was pretty low. Forget about just reaching down and prying the dog off with a gunbarrel
Probably not but he could have easily suffered a career ending injury. One that would have left him limping badly for life. People have had to have amputations from dog bites and some HAVE lost their lives to them. How do you know how serious this bite was or wasn't?Jeff Oehlsen said:this is an opportunity to save a life, that cop could of died from that leg bite.
Probably never a good idea.Jeff Oehlsen said:Forget common sense
There's no indication that anyone "fired blindly." Making such a statement is just inflammatory.Jeff Oehlsen said:why use that when we can get away with shooting blindly 26 times.
According to the news article, NYPD has already determined that they acted properly. Not gonna be fired.Jeff Oehlsen said:They should all be fired. screw em, if they are that stupid, GONE.
Just about universally when a police officer gets hurt it's because his stupidity took the form of being too nice, giving people the benefit of the doubt or giving people a break.Jeff Oehlsen said:Time to actually have to pay for your stupidity.
There's nothing the slightest bit humorous in this situation. It's sad all around. Sad for the injured cop. Sad for the "teenager." And sad for the dog and his owners.Jeff Oehlsen said:the image I get in my head of this happening is pretty funny.
Darn right Jeff. I'll be the first one to admit that sometimes cops do the wrong thing. I arranged for the firing of several that I caught at it. Cops come from the same gene pool as everyone else. The background examination that we go through weeds out most of the crooks, idiots and those not psychologically suited but it's not perfect. Sometimes bad apples slip through the cracks, sometimes they're friends of relatives of the right (wrong) people and they get through. Sometimes they go bad after getting in. There are about 800,000 police officers in the US. Expect that a few of them will be stupid. Expect that some of them will be crooks. Expect that some of them will make mistakes today.Jeff Oehlsen said:I knew you were gonna get me for that post.
According to the news story, NYPD conducted an investigation. Do you have any factual support that it was any less than a "hell of an investigation?" In any case, once a person (or a dog) has "earned the right to be shot" (by his actions) it makes no difference how many times he's shot (except to civilians who have watched too much TV). As long as he's a threat, it's appropriate and proper for the police to continue shooting. As long as the dog continued to bite, it was appropriate and proper for those officers to shoot at him.Stacia Porter said:If my husband and his fellow soldiers had shot an armed Iraqi man 26 times, there'd be one hell of an investigation.
I haven't suggested that you do so. I am saying that you don't know the entire story from a 400 word news report. Typically investigations of such incidents run dozens of pages and thousands of words.Stacia Porter said:Especially if several soldiers were grazed with bullets during the firefight AND it was in the presence of a minor. Why should I hold the NYPD to different standards?
Well, first of all it HURTS. That's going to affect how well the shot is placed. Secondly (I don't know but can reasonably assume, having seen dozens of real dog bites on real humans) it's not a calm situation. This dog was probably thrashing about violently, making the placement of a gun against his head, all but impossible. When a (normal, not drugged or drunk) human being realizes that he's not the top of the food chain he becomes a very primitive animal. So primitive that he often forgets that he's the "tool using animal." I've seen suspects bitten by dogs put down guns and knives they had in their hands to fight the dog. Common sense is not present at those moments, survival is.Stacia Porter said:dog is on your leg. How can you not put a bullet through its head?
I'd really like to put you into a highly stressful situation and see how you'd respond. All of the people I did that to in my career, had the same response, "I had no idea." So easy to sit in your living room and pass judgment on people about whose job you know little or nothing.Stacia Porter said:And why do several officers fire at once, risking collateral damage?
That would have been a tragedy, but still the officers would have been justified.Stacia Porter said:What if one of those bullets had gone into an apartment and killed another occupant?
Do you mean "volley of bullets?"Stacia Porter said:Forget the dog: there were people living in this building, people who were probably home and in their apartments when a voray of bullets
You write as if this was a spray of water from a garden hose, indiscriminately fanning out in all directions. It wasn't. The officers were trying to hit one target, albeit one that was probably moving quite rapidly.Stacia Porter said:were sprayed over their hallway
It wasn't over a dog. It was over the survival of a police officer.Stacia Porter said:(OVER A DOG).
It's not perfectly clear that all 26 rounds hit the dog. The article states in the headline "Cops 'justified' to shoot pit bull 26 times" but then in the article it says that, "it took 26 bullets to subdue the attacking dog" I'd guess, based on the fact that we often miss human sized targets in stressful situations that the dog wasn't hit with all 26 rounds that were fired.Stacia Porter said:If the dog were hit 26 times
Twenty six rounds. It's quite clear how many bullets were flying.Stacia Porter said:and several officers received graze wounds, think about the number of bullets that were flying.
Two officers shooting at the same time can fire 26 rounds in less than two seconds. Is that a lot of "trigger time?"Stacia Porter said:Unless the NYPD is using machine guns these days, that's a lot of trigger time.
Stacia what kind of education and experience do you have in investigating shootings? I'd guess none. Your comment about "trigger time" clearly shows that. Your education probably consists of watching some TV shows and extrapolating from there. As I said earlier, you don't know that you don't know.Woody Taylor said:speculation on this kind of stuff never works out and only offends the people on this forum who have been in spots that we can't really imagine. To Lou's point, it's just a sad situation all around. Don't know what we learn factually about this, good or bad, particularly from a source like the NY Daily News.
Good Lord, a 12 year old dog? Probably was asleep and couldn't hear much except the door of its home being broken into. And can we PLEASE not ALWAYS have to use the phrase "and the pit bull locked its jaws on (insert body part here)" in every pit bull attack story ever? :roll: Not to mention that the dog's name in the NYT's article was named Red and the one in the NYDN article was Cookie, so who knows.4 Officers Hurt (One by Pit Bull) as Police Fire 26 Shots to Kill Dog in Bronx
By FERNANDA SANTOS
Published: July 24, 2006
Three officers were grazed by bullets yesterday morning, when the police fired more than two dozen shots at a pit bull that had locked its jaws around a fourth officers leg in a Bronx building, the authorities said yesterday.
In all, the police fired 26 bullets at Red, the pit bull, during a confrontation inside a fourth-floor hallway at 480 Concord Avenue, in the Port Morris neighborhood, about 12:10 a.m. Nine shots hit the dog, according to its owner, Theresa Franco, and a number of errant bullets grazed the officers in the leg, the police said.
Red, who was 12 years old and weighed about 45 pounds, died at the scene, while the four injured officers were listed in stable condition at Lincoln Hospital.
Five officers were on the fourth floor at the time of the shooting, trying to mediate a dispute between a resident and the superintendent, when they came upon the pit bull outside Ms. Francos apartment, the police said. The narrow hallway was dimly lighted and the dog seemed agitated, witnesses said. Suddenly, the dog charged one of the officers and bit his leg, the police said. Gunfire erupted and within seconds, the three officers were hit and the dog was dead.
The officers, who were from the 40th Precinct, were not identified. The police did not say how many of them fired shots.
The shooting was justified, the Police Departments chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said yesterday. As with any police shooting, the tactics employed, including the number of shots fired, will be examined by the firearms review board. The police said there would be no necropsy on the dog.
Ms. Franco, however, told a slightly different version of events. She said the officers had been chasing a teenage boy whom they saw smoking marijuana on the stairwell when they came face to face with her dog. The boy had managed to get inside Ms. Francos apartment before the police could get to him, she said. He locked the door behind him, not realizing that the dog had slipped outside.
The dog was nervous from all the commotion, Ms. Franco, 33, said. As one of the officers kicked and banged on her door, she said, the dog attacked. She said she heard two shots at first, and then so many more that she lost count.
Mr. Browne said that once the injured officers had recovered, they would re-enact yesterdays shooting at the Police Departments firing range in the Bronx standard practice with every police-involved shooting.
Im upset that a member of my family was killed, said Ms. Franco, who brought the dog into her home as a puppy and named it for its red nose. Red was docile, a good house dog who had never bitten anyone, she said. It was so big and sturdy that children used to ride on its back, a neighbor, Barbara Johnson, said.
There were at least a dozen bullet holes on the metal door and door frame at Ms. Francos apartment, as well as on a corner wall nearby. The door itself was warped and off its hinges at the top. Blood drops were sprinkled on the stairs, delineating a trail that led from the fourth floor to the lobby.
At 11:15 a.m., a crime scene unit detective carried the pit bulls body out of the building, encased in a box that resembled a rolling trunk.
Jennifer Epstein contributed reporting for this article.
Good grief, what kind of guns are they using?! I don't see 26 rounds being fired between two people shooting 9mm or 45 ammo in less than 2 seconds unless they're firing automatic weapons.Two officers shooting at the same time can fire 26 rounds in less than two seconds.
I'm more liberal than conservative, so I can't take the obligatory shot at the NYT. ;-)Maren Bell said:Woody, here's one from the New York Times
Nope. The appropriateness of their actions has to be judged by what the circumstances were and what was their state of mind at the time of the incident. This is very old law. It's been stated by the US Supreme Court as, "The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments - in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving - about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation."Stacia Porter said:And if someone other than the police officers had been hit by one of those bullets, would that change your view?
Yep. But since the NYPD investigation found that they acted properly, I'll acquiesce to their judgment. They had all the facts, we have few.Stacia Porter said:Do PD's not have to worry about collateral damage?
Not very. But that's what they did. That's how the situation was resolved. And the NYPD said it was within policy.Stacia Porter said:How safe is it for MULTIPLE officers to fire at a dog on an officer's leg?
That's part of what's causing you not to understand. The military model is not the same as the police model. The "Rules of Engagement" are vastly different.Stacia Porter said:I may not have PD experience, but I've grown up in military families...and I'll say it again: no one would accept this scenario from soldiers.
Please tell us what articles of the UCMJ would have been violated? The fact that you base part of your statement on how the media would play this just shows how confused you are. The media is in the business of selling newspapers or air time, not telling the truth and not in what's right. They get the facts wrong too often and have been caught blatantly falsifying facts.Stacia Porter said:If a squad went into an Iraqi apartment building after a suspect and a dog came out and bit one of the soldiers, if several fired at the dog at once and soldiers were hurt in teh process IN A RESIDENCE, there'd be hell to pay: not only under the UCMJ, but in the media.
I'd bet that his has happened dozens of times. Perhaps not in Iraq because of their outlook on dogs in general, but in many other places around the world. And I'd bet that when it did, the dog was dispatched and the soldiers moved on. Sad over having to kill a dog that was merely defending his home but glad to be alive.Stacia Porter said:That would be considered too dangerous for the civilians
Pure speculation on your part. But since you brought it up . . . How many times have officials apologized for "just" missing a military target and killing a buncha innocent civilians in just this conflict alone? The answer is dozens. It happens quite frequently.Stacia Porter said:There would be NO military official on the 6 o'clock news declaring the squad's actions "justified."
There are recourses available if that had occurred. There's nothing wrong with that viewpoint, but it's not all-controlling.Stacia Porter said:That's where I come from on this...concern for the innocent citizens who could have been injured.
NYPD already has. The first news story said, "Police chiefs said NYPD procedures were followed . . . " The second news story said, " 'The shooting was justified,' the Police Departments chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said yesterday." Knowing the basic facts as outlined in the two news stories, my findings would have been the same. Had a military investigation been conducted, I have no doubt that their findings would have been similar.Stacia Porter said:I would hope that PD SOP's do not condone this
It is.Stacia Porter said:since the NYPD is claiming the situation was justified, and you are defending it, I suppose that isn't the case. If it's applicable to combat situations, I think it ought to be in civilian criminal scenarios as well...
Most officers on NYPD are carrying Glock 19's in 9mm. They're semi-automatic, meaning that the gun fires each time that the trigger is pulled. (Automatic, means that the gun will empty itself with one pull of the trigger). In fact it's quite easy to shoot at this rate or higher. Never mind when one is highly stressed and pumped full of adrenalin.Kristen Cabe said:Good grief, what kind of guns are they using?! I don't see 26 rounds being fired between two people shooting 9mm or 45 ammo in less than 2 seconds unless they're firing automatic weapons.
I think that's a safe bet Woody.Woody Taylor said:This just strikes me as cursory treatment of something most of us will never really "get."
that sums up this thread beautifully connie. well done...Connie Sutherland said:I think it's a safe bet, too, Lou and Woody.
We just do not know enough to judge. People who did know enough did judge.
I can't even imagine the amount of information we would have to absorb in order to have intelligent discourse about it. But we don't have the information, and most of use don't have the experience.
Semiautomatic, as you have stated, means that one bullet is fired with each pull of the trigger. One would have to pull the trigger approximately 35 times to fire 26 rounds. Could you imagine being able to pull a trigger 17.5 times per second?!* Semiautomatic - 45 rounds per minute
* Burst - 90 rounds per minute
* Sustained - 12-15 rounds per minute