Is it really that hard to figure out that you are not at the correct address? And why don't they just show up with lights and sirens? That is why they have lights and sirens. Legal consequences uncertain after Grand Prairie police shoot man at wrong house | FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth
The backstory: It all started Friday around 1:45 a.m. Grand Prairie police responded to a call for an active disturbance.
Officers knocked on the door of a home on Holly Hills Drive for five minutes. Then, police say, the homeowner opened the garage armed with a gun.
Police say the man pointed the gun at officers, then the officers fired their weapons and hit him in the leg.
The other part of the story is that cops never identified themselves.
But the real story, is that the cops are too freakin' stupid to read a map.
According to the story, the 911 system came up with the wrong address, so maybe it wasn't the cops' fault? Or maybe that's just the excuse. Time will tell.
ReplyDeleteWhether they Identified themselves as cops is irrelevant. Any old criminal can yell out "this is the police" and some even try to dress the part:
https://www.police1.com/crime/2-men-impersonating-officers-fatally-shot-by-texas-homeowners-after-firing-shots-through-door
It was somewhere after 1:30 AM, they start banging on the door, dude doesn't know what's going on, grabs his gun and, rather intelligently I'd say, doesn't go to the door they're banging on (stay out of the murder hole) he goes out through the garage and flanks them.
The news story emphasized several times that the cops knocked at the door for 5 minutes...Is there some requirement I'm unaware of where a homeowner is obligated to open their door for people banging on it in the middle of the night within a certain timeframe?
The story also interviewed the homeowner, who says he went out through the garage thinking they were criminals, saw the police cars and lights, dropped his gun and then was shot. The fact that there's no indication that he returned fire after they started popping off at him lends credence to his account in my opinion.
Color me skeptical of the "he pointed the gun at us" excuse. The body cam footage should shine some light on that subject; but even if he did - he was facing an unknown number of potential assailants in the middle of the night for no reason known to him: is it unreasonable for him to assume something bad was afoot and be prepared to defend himself?
Point his weapon in the general direction of the presumed assailants and yell "WTF is going on out here?
I'd say that is imminently reasonable. The fact that they're trying to charge him is ridiculous.
Whenever these things happen, I want to know why no lights and sirens? You're worried about waking people up? Wake them the fuck up. If there are bad guys running loose, they should know it. If they came to house with lights and sirens and then shut off the the sirens, the homeowner would have been more in the frame of mind, "What's going on officer?"
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