I'm thinking they might've been using the big double-cuffed industrial zip ties. Some of our cops around here use them. With one of those tactical folder knives that pretty much all cops carry, they can be removed almost instantly with a quick flip of the wrist.

I think they probably must have realized they were being filmed. I think i read somewhere that as many as 12 people captured it on video? It would be hard for a trained policeman to miss 12 people with cellphone cameras out.

Well you have at least made a reasonable argument the guy wasn't cuffed, so we can agree to disagree until it's found out definitively, but again you're 100% correct- it is totally irrelevant really, it was a really bad shooting. No lawful justification whatsoever.

I am rather thinking that he would've reacted by flinching or throwing his arms outward, or reaching up to try and nurse the wound in the immediate aftermath, but he doesn't do any of that. The arms just remain in the interlaced rear position and don't move at all. Now perhaps he just didn't react AT ALL to being shot in the back, but i find that highly unlikely. We'll find out soon enough, i guess. I am sure if there is any way at all that they can portray it as such, they'll swear the cuffs were not on him, and he was 'still resisting'.

Just imagine had there been no cameras present, how the cops would've spun this. The cop in question would probably have been written up as a hero and given a commendation for bravery.... :-/

I agree the guy seems like a skin headed racist anti-gov't type, however, he had nice a nice clear slow mo video of the incident, and SOME of what he says makes perfect sense.

One would expect that when shot in the back one would flail their arms out, or at least flinch, or go unconscious/into shock and have them sag, or perhaps even convulse/twitch a bit.

But to just stay in place, and not move at all? Seems highly unlikely to me....but then, i have never executed anyone at point blank range before, so i admit i am just hypothesizing. ;)

Perhaps it's just me, but i have no problem drawing definitive conclusions based on reasonably clear color video. If you had to convict someone based on a typical security camera video or still image you would have nowhere near as much definitive proof to go by, but DA's and Juries put Americans in jail every day with just such evidence.

Moving color video captured from several angles by several eyewitnesses? Pffft, that's good as gold, you cannot get more damning evidence short of a signed confession. I've seen all i need to see. If it was me in that video, i'd be just as guilty as the cop is...

But you do tolerate 'citizen hating street justice' or 'utterly incompetent policing' as meted out every day by cops all across the country?

Most interesting.

Guess what bro, in my idea of a civilized society cops (many of whom are blatant racists) don't blast restrained, non-resisting Americans in the back with high velocity pistol fire. Not ever. And when they do, they go to prison for the rest of their natural days for it...

Call me crazy

PS: No, i don't think you're a douche. Generally speaking, you seem like a rather nice, and quite astute fella. Just not now. ;)

Must be a secret.

Or maybe if he told you he would have to kill you. :eek:

Is it that obvious?

I don't know if the shooter in this incident was even armed with a Taser, but your conclusions are ridiculous.

If the officer was carrying a Taser, odds are it would be this model:

http://www.taser.com/products/law/Pages/TASERM26.aspx

It weighs about 20 oz.

A Glock 17 weighs about 30 oz. loaded.

Your conclusion, "This would be like grabbing a timing light and somehow thinking you were holding a .44 magnum revolver," again demonstrates that you know less about this subject than you have tried to imply.

The glock in your example weighs 50% more than the tazer you cite.

50% more....

http://i208.photobucket.com/albums/b...elie/tazer.jpg

How could you hold that and mistake it for the feel of holding a 50% heavier glock with a different grip shape and balance? Trained professionals are intimately familiar with their gear, there is no way a trained professional could mistake grabbing a tazer for a fully loaded glock, not even in the pitch dark. What's more, your finger should NEVER be on the trigger until the moment you're ready to fire. EVER. Why was his finger on the trigger? A trigger that is shaped very differently than the safe-action trigger on the Glock series pistols, which are in fact entirely distinctive in feel, and INSTANTLY recognizable as being a glock?

This may come as a surprise to you, but i could field strip and reassamble an M-16A2 rifle blindfolded in mere seconds when i was in the infantry.

You could have handed me literally any other weapon on earth -any- and i would have known it was not an M-16A2. Instantly. Just like any infantryman could. While blindfolded.

An A-1 didn't have the finger groove on the grip, and was a good deal lighter, and a CAR-15A2, while it has the finger groove it is, again, much lighter. Any other rifle type would be instantly recognizable as not being an M-16. Likewise, a .308 AR with the an A2 finger groove grip would be immediately noticeable because of the difference in weight.

Now i own a S&W 3rd gen double stack 9mm semi auto pistol. You could hand me any other pistol on earth (glock, sig, HK, even a single stack 3rd gen S&W, or an earlier gen double stack S&W auto), and i would know instantly that it was not a 9mm Smith & Wesson 3rd generation double stack auto. I can disassemble and reassemble it with total confidence even blindfolded. If you gave me a tazer i would instantly know that it's not my pistol. Instantly.

Professionals are intimately familiar with their gear.

What's more, a sidearm is mandated by law to be stowed in a triple retention holster. AFAIK that's not the case for the tazer. And they are not carried in the same place on the body anyway.

For an officer to totally forget what weapon was where on his person and mis-draw a firearm instead of a tazer is an absolutely stinging rebuke of BART's entire training program, and the outright competence of the people it's putting in uniform. Let alone to then accidentally discharge said weapon into a restrained, secured, non-resisting subject laying face down on the ground. It is so totally incomprehensible that a cops training could fail so badly that i outright reject the notion out of hand.

Seriously competent, how is there any way to paint this as anything other than the worst possible police incompetence and/or mis-use of power imaginable? How can you see that as a citizen and not be enraged, knowing that any innocent bystander passing by could have been hit instead....or YOU or your kid could have been mistakenly hit, or even mistakenly caught up in the whole mess to begin with, which also happens sometimes too.

PS: This is another clear example of why all police firearms should have manual safeties.

Maybe you need to become a BART Policeman!

Tom

In Oakland, as well as many other cities, there are situations that are more "volatile", but cops still don't feel the need to draw their firearm. As an expert on Oakland, you should know that. And why was Mehserle the only one to pull out his gun? Like you, maybe he was the only one that considered people yelling at him an "immediate threat." If Mehserle was justified in drawing his weapon, as you believe, why would you wish that he didn't? This is clear: you only see and believe that to which you are predisposed.

Wow. I'm impressed.

So are you now going to tell me there has never been an accidental discharge of a firearm in the military that ended up killing a soldier?

Or are you going to tell me that there has never been any "friendly fire" deaths in the military in conflict situations since people like you, who are such "professionals" and are so well trained, are incapable of making a mistake, even when in a high-stress situation?

Face it, military and police work is a dangerous, imprecise business -- training is done (I doubt training was real intense for the BART force) for efficiency and safety, but in sh***y situations, accidents are prone to happen. And sometimes those accidents will result in deaths.

You are expecting a level of precision and training probably not available for day-to-day police work (most municipalities simply cannot afford it). We end up with "Barney Fife" type law enforcement officers and sometimes terrible accidents such as seen in that video.

You can either "jump all over" the officer in this situation and scream about how "incompetent" he is, or you can recognize and accept the reality: We do not live in a perfect world.

I'd be willing to bet that if we took "trained" police officers and "trained" soldiers, put them in a high-stress situation, and had them grab the grip of a 20-oz Taser, or a 30-oz Glock, then very quickly identify which tool they were holding, we'd find a significant percentage would initially mis-identify what they grabbed.

It wouldn't mean that all the police and soldiers who would made such a mistake were "incompetent," or "unfit" to do the tough jobs they do; it would just be a demonstration of the imperfect world we live in.

And police officers have ended up dead because they pulled a weapon with a manual safety and forgot to release the safety because of the stress they were experiencing.

Yes, one could blame such a "mistake" on "inadequate" training, but even with significant training, stress can be a wild card.

Additionally, do we really want a police force made up of only "highly trained weapons specialists," who handle their firearms with absolute precision no matter how stressful the situation, or do we want officers with broader skills -- especially social skills?

Odds are, you wouldn't like living in a world where all the police officers were just those with unique "high stress capable" skills.

Again, one needs to accept that we are living in an imprecise world.

That doesn't mean we ignore a shooting like this, or excuse the officer's behavior just because "accidents happen." It does mean we don't display the "lynch mob mentality," expressed by some on this thread, when a police shooting like this occurs.

well I wish we had some real data on cops shot vs citizens killed by police
google it and you get squat
sure they love to go into detail on shot cops
but NO DATA on the numbers of bad shootings or even questionable ones of citizens
WONDER WHAT THE MAN IS HIDING

BTW police investigation of police is a very bad joke

I think the numbers of citizen killed is about 1 dead cop to 100 dead citizens
and that is way too high

plus every dead cop results in murder 1 charges against the citizen
and every dead citizen results in no murder1 charge against the cop
at best they charge man slaughter or more common nothing at all

I think justice needs to work both ways or it doesnot work at all

And cops have died because their gun got taken away and it had no safety. (Conversely, cops have not died because their sidearm did have a manual safety.)

And people have died because cops have accidentally shot them.

And cops have accidentally shot themselves.

A manual safety removes 90% of that. If that cops sidearm had a manual safety, the chances of this happening are much smaller, as it would require another layer of stupidity entirely for the cop to defeat the "Dont kill innocents" switch and still shoot the guy anyway.

With the exception of the M-11 sidearm and mortar tubes, i think every single weapons system in the US military has a manual safety(or arm switch). From the M-9, to the the M-14/25, the M-16, to the M-240 GPMG and M-249 SAW to the M-2 HMG all the way up to the 120mm gun on an M-1 Abrams. My firearms all have them too. I trust my training and common sense to remember to remove my safety, much as i trust my training to remember to draw my gun...

The training of the average US cop is at least as good as the training of the average US soldier.

Seriously, any attempts to justify this event are just mind boggling. Not accidentally shooting the subdued and prostrate citizenry in the back (after unjustifiably presenting your weapon to begin with) is a bare minimum standard to be able to expect our cops to adhere too....don'tcha think?

The world I want to live in holds police accountable for their actions the same as citizens. It doesn't matter if this cop was reaching for his gun, a taser, or a doughnut. It doesn't matter if the kid is dead or alive and it doesn't matter if he limed up and shot the whole lot. What does matter is that he will not be punished for what he did because he has a badge. That is the problem. Cops can kill citizens with no repercussions and the only people who will ever look into the shooting are more crooked cops.

Like this one where a cop was shooting at a snake of all things and killed 5 year old fishing with his Grandfather. No charges filed.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,292168,00.html

This is a video of a cop hitting and killing a child on a bike while traveling 30mph over the posted speed limit. No charges filed.

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/Police_Say_Speeding_Cruiser_Struck__Killed_Boy_Dal las-Fort_Worth.html

In this case plain clothes police shot a man 12 times in the back. No charges filed.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/01/09/new.orleans.shooting/


If citizens can't prosecute in a case like this when will we ever see justice?

Police forces conducting their own investigations is like me conducting my own tax audit.

Here in Ontario we have a group called the Special Investigations Unit:

What that blurb doesn't mention is that by law they MUST investigate every single incident involving police resulting is serious injury or death. Even if it's a non-emergency car crash, they investigate.

We REALLY need that here in the US.

the Bee sucks, heard about this on Armstrong&Getty on the radio in the morning after it happened. Print is dead, especially if it is a McClatchy paper
generally, you signed a consent to be treated at that point, and it is a civil thing, unless the doctor was drunk or something


Looks pretty obviously to be negligent homicide or manslaughter. It is incomprehensible how you could make a mistake like that

We actually had a citizens' oversight committee in Seattle until sometime last year. Not just any citizens, either. Former Mayor, some former Congressmen and women, and other such people who had held some sort of office. Their job was to maintain oversight over the Seattle PD, launching inquiries and/or investigations into allegations levied against the police.

They all resigned and the committee was disbanded last year. They gave up in the face of overwhelming lack of cooporation from the police. The real straw that broke that camel's back, however, was the fact that the police chief carried "veto authority" over their findings and decisions. In case after case after case, when this committee found against an officer, the chief merely overode their findings. So they all quit in disgust, making a very public announcement as to why, including a letter to Mayor Nickels expressing their anger and frustration.

I get so annoyed at people stating as fact things that are not true. The above statement is not true. Maybe in Philly, but not in California. If that was the case, Every major department in California would be issuing holsters violating that supposed law. Please get your FACTS straight, Someone might mistake you as someone who knows what they are talking about

In an earlier post someone else stated that he knew the officer had previously drew his weapon and then put it back in the holster because there was already a round in the chamber...I think some people have seen to many chamber a round for dramatic effect before confronting the bad guy scenes in movies and tv...Other then the Military Police and maybe that has changed now, Every Police Officer keeps a round in the chamber and are trained that way from the academy

It's little things like this that can make a citizens review board a problem. I've said it before, If the review board is trained and required to go on a number of ride-alongs and subjected to real life and real time situations, I'm all for it. But I'll be damned if I gonna be judged by someone whose only experience is watching TJ hooker or reading Pelican Off topic threads and thinking m21sniper is a subject matter expert. ;) The average citizen doesn't have a clue as evidenced by some of posts by people on this board.

How does something like this happen......Stress. really unfortunate.

Sniper, I do agree with you about the Manual Safety. Alot of agenices(mine included) are not authorized Glocks because of the lack of manual safety.

So MMarsh what was your take on the video? Your insight may help clarify a bewildering incident. I don't think the cop began his shift hoping to find somebody to shoot, so what was it that caused him to unholster the weapon and fire?
I'm not trying to get you in a game of gotcha (but cannot speak for the other Pelicans) but your LEO experience may help.

I was aghast when I saw this. And why wasn't the officer relieved and interviewed by IAD the next day? This has been completely mishandled from the instant it happened. No proactive effort by the BART Police, Oakland Police or DA to question him, or hold him on any charge at all. This inaction just undermines any respect for law enforcement.