For those who think now-former Brooklyn Center police officer Kim Potter should be charged with a crime – let alone murder – I have a simple question: if a surgeon accidentally nicks an artery and kills a patient when she mistakes the scalpel in her hand for a prober, should she be charged with murder, or even manslaughter?
Answer: no.
After all, the surgeon did this thing we all do: she made a mistake. She had no ill intent, let alone malice.
A Delaware police officer who was beaten to death this week after coming to the aid of an elderly couple is continuing to save lives even after becoming a statistic in what is shaping up to be another deadly year for the nation’s law enforcement officers.
Delmar Police Cpl. Keith Heacook, who was attacked by a career criminal early Sunday, was declared dead Wednesday but was kept on life support until his organs could be harvested. He was the 119th law enforcement officer to die in the line of duty in 2021, according to the Officer Down Memorial Page.
More than 200 Seattle police officers walked off the job last year, according to the Seattle Police Department, following weeks of protests and heightened “anti-police rhetoric.”
Like the Louisville, Kentucky, police department, which revealed, earlier this week, that it is in a “staffing crisis” following the departure of nearly 200 of its own officers, Seattle’s police department is losing police officers “at a record pace.”
Between January 1 and April 25, the number of homicides increased by 92% compared to the same period in 2020. More than 80% of the shooting victims in 2020 were black.
“There’s way more people it seems like with guns now than there ever has been,” another Minneapolis cop told me, and “much less hesitation to use them.” These officers theorize that the explanation for the crime surge is related to the city’s political climate over the past year, which in their view has allowed perpetrators to wreak havoc without consequence. “They feel emboldened and they feel untouchable, in my opinion,” the cop said.
Fed up with being second-guessed and used as political pawns, over a dozen officers from the Albuquerque, New Mexico PD have resigned from the riot control squad this month, the head of the police union told RT in an interview.
Fed up with being second-guessed and used as political pawns, over a dozen officers from the Albuquerque, New Mexico PD have resigned from the riot control squad this month, head of the police union told RT in an interview.
“What is going on is all about trust. The Albuquerque police officers do not trust the administration they work for. There is no morale,” said Shaun Willoughby.
Colorado Senate Bill 62 exemplifies just how radical criminal justice reform proposals have become. Ostensibly about bail reform and managing jail populations across the state, the bill, on closer reading, reveals its real aim: to eliminate police discretion to make arrests—even for serious felonies.
One Texas sheriff has had it with loud-mouthed activists blaming police officers for the inevitable result of bad parenting – and now, he’s saying it.
According to local reports, the Thorckmorton County Sheriff’s Office is putting on blast parents who want to hold public authority figures accountable for their own failures in raising their kids to be law-abiding members of society, telling them quite blunty that “it is not the job of the officer to raise your kid.”
“IT IS NOT THE JOB OF THE OFFICER TO RAISE YOUR KID,” Throckmorton County Sheriff Doc Wigington wrote on Facebook. “Parents need to take responsibility for the actions of their FAILURE to raise their child to be respectful, responsible and listen to authority figures.”
Amid the vitriol that’s been directed at police officers since the launch of the left’s “defund the police” campaign, the country is currently facing a shortage of cops that’s only likely to get worse.
Although this news will make Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s heart leap, it’s a dangerous development for all of us, perhaps most of all for minorities.
In the Philadelphia area, for instance, not only is the city’s police department “struggling with a shortage of police recruits and a surge in retirements,” according to a report Sunday in The Philadelphia Inquirer, but one suburban police chief told the newspaper, “People don’t want to be police anymore. It’s a good job, and good-paying job, but when you look at national news every day, people just don’t want to be officers.”
With the Derek Chauvin trial concluded, the anti-cop Left needed a new cause célèbre. And they sure weren’t picky about who it would be.
Ma’Khia Bryant had a knife, and she was a fraction of a second from plunging it into an unnamed black woman dressed in a pink sweatsuit.
But she never got the chance, thanks to the efforts of a Columbus, Ohio, police officer named Nicholas Reardon. Reardon, responding to a 911 call in which it was reported that a young woman was assaulting others with a knife, drew his pistol and shot Ma’Khia Bryant before she could stab her intended victim. She died shortly thereafter as the neighborhood around the foster home where she lived began to boil at the scene, with profanity-laced epithets hurled at Reardon and other law enforcement officers as they attempted to save her life.
They gathered in a circle Wednesday night, the crowd more than 200 strong, standing on the broken and weedy patch of parking lot pavement and chanting the 16-year-old girl’s name.
Say her name. Ma’Khia Bryant. Say her name.
‘No opportunity’ to de-escalate: Use-of-force experts say Columbus officer obeyed training
An Ohio criminal-justice professor who studies the fatal use of force by law-enforcement officers didn’t hesitate to render an opinion after watching body-camera video of a Columbus police officer fatally shooting a 16-year-old girl Tuesday afternoon on the city’s Southeast Side.
“My first impression is that the officer was legally justified in using deadly force,” said Philip Stinson, a Bowling Green State University professor who has compiled nationwide statistics on fatal shootings that have led to criminal charges against officers.
Because facts don’t matter.
Detroit Police chief James Craig said on Monday that it was “reckless and disgusting” for Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) to say that policing in the United States is “inherently & intentionally racist.”
In an appearance on CNN, the police chief was asked about Tlaib’s fiery tweet, in which she claimed that the recent police-involved shooting of Duane Wright “wasn’t an accident” and that “policing in our country is inherently & intentionally racist.”
A routine traffic stop in Brooklyn went awry after a driver attacked NYPD officers with chemicals and a Molotov cocktail. The suspect was detained after a brief chase.
The suspect, identified by local media as Lionel Virgile, was stopped by the cops on Saturday after running a red light.
The radicalization of the Ben & Jerry’s PR department has been one of the stranger spectacles of recent years. After all, for all its hippyish origins and homespun shtick, Ben & Jerry’s is a corporate giant flogging expensive ice creams with wacky names like Cherry Garcia and Truffle Kerfuffle. And yet it has become remarkably preoccupied with virtue-signaling and moral hectoring. It is hard to tell whether this is a deliberate strategy for attention, or if someone’s pious nephew has simply seized control of the social-media accounts at head office.
Portland, Oregon’s City Council approved $1.4 million for “unarmed” patrols to be stationed in parks to fight gun crime.
KGW reports there will be “two dozen” such patrols, working a schedule that ensures someone is working “around-the-clock.”
It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on all of the action in Portland, Oregon, where the “autonomous zone” set up by rioters has been plaguing both residents and the law enforcement officials tasked with maintaining order. But now that the trial of Dereck Chauvin is underway with the possibility that the entire “justice for George Floyd” initiative may be nearing the finish line, things are probably finally starting to calm down, right?
