For me a defining moment was during the riots in Ferguson, MO, when the cops showed up with a belt-fed machine gun on top of an APC. Both Republican and Democrat administrations are guilty of showering military weapons on local PDs.

And now we have SWAT teams crashing into an old woman’s house in search of a cell phone (wasn’t there) because a cop showed a “find me” app to a judge. Only there were five other houses in the possible range!

Leadership, as an Infantry leader would understand it, is not a requirement for law enforcement “leaders”. Having spent time in both worlds of Infantry and law enforcement, I saw this first hand. A law enforcement leader is more of an administrative manager and supervisor then they are a fire team leader.

There are exceptions, of course, for tactical teams and the like. And there are the occasional fellow veterans on the force, who were squared away leaders in the military and bring some of that into their law enforcement position. But your run-of-the-mill patrol sergeant got those stripes by scoring well on an administrative test and possibly checking off some demographic blocks, depending on the agency.

What galls me about this whole situation is the complete circling of the wagons between the PD, the city, and the DA who presented the case to the grand jury. It seems that at every step of the way, they endeavored to keep their men out of the hot seat and actively thwart any sort of justice for Daniel and his family. If I recall from my reading, the city went as far as to re-hire the shooter into a admin position for the singular purpose to extend his civil service and qualify him for a disability pension. Taxpayer dollars hard at work.

Nor does it seem that the city or PD admitted any sort of fault or accepted any sort of blame. I’m sure the settlement was the best that Daniel’s widow was going to get, and I’m sure that there is a “we admit no wrongdoing” in the legalese.

As a hypo, Army style. Three or four guys go into town and tear up a bar. Two or three times in a month. The company commander isn’t liable for the furniture, not is he going to be prosecuted for the offenses. He will be marked down for failure of leadership or some such, which is to say he didn’t figure out how to shuffle these guys off to some other unit before things got bad. Or go UCMJ on them so they didn’t have a chance to go off post or….had a heart-to-heart which straightened them out. His OER will reflect that negativity and he probably won’t make major.
In the instant situation, it would be interesting to know what this guy got away with and wasn’t fired, not to mention made sergeant. This couldn’t be his first oopsie. Command, without laying a finger on the motel situation, is guilty here.

Better training would have had the scene commander not having his force bunched at one end of a long hallway and the “suspects” at the other. Assuming worst situation, the police are a big fat target and the suspect a small one. Also, since this is Arizona, a call to the room from the office would have resolved the tension before any rifles were pointed. The victim may have behaved somewhat foolishly, but he didn’t break any laws, and deserved the presumption of innocence.

Some tactical training would have helped that sergeant to stop, take a deep breath, and rachet the tension back. Because you don’t want to have a shooting!

It’s no different from the training I did in the Air Force decades ago. Okay, now you have to deploy to a new location, and keep up your support of the flying mission. What do you need to bring? Is there a better way to pack it? Can we have a complete set of materials so that if the call comes, we can grab it and run?

And then you actually do it. Grab the stuff, load it on the truck (it was a dark blue school bus) and off you go. Now set up a weather station in the parking lot of a national guard armory 50 miles away. Whoops, we didn’t bring a portable light! Those markers dried out since we put them in the box. Make notes, go home, write a newer, better plan. And test it.

In this case, remind the sergeant that he’s not commanding the 82nd Airborne Tactical Hotel Assault Squad. He’s a police officer, a civilian. So quit trying to act like you’re Barney Bad Ass, think about what you’re there for–to answer a simple question–and make sure everyone is calm and fingers aren’t on the bang switch.

So when the time does come, you’ve been there before, and you have some confidence that you can handle the adversity. And, not sound like a hysterical idiot, and kill an innocent man who was no threat.

You can bet your life’s savings on that.

I always felt that Derek Chauvin’s crime was not act of racism but was an abuse of authority.

He first pointed out a lot of details, some of which I knew, that weren’t apparent from the video. Then, he said the scene commander and the shooter cop were both wrong, wrong, and deserved worse than they got.

It wasn’t the SWAT team. It seems the SWAT team works 8 to 5 and isn’t called out at night but for special circumstances. It was a routine response with a bunch of patrol cops, led by a sergeant. The whole confusing screaming begins to make sense if one understands that the screamer (the sergeant) had no special training.

So instead of moving in once the victim was prone, limbs extended, the sergeant kept screaming at a drunk, terrified man to crawl toward the police, but crawl in this manner, not another, and then contradicted his instructions. The victim kept trying to pull up his shorts. The last attempt to do so triggered the shooter.

The cops were overcharged. This led to the acquittal.

Mesa even now has a lot of Mormon residents. Arizona has a lot of Mormon residents. For those who haven’t lived around a lot of Mormons, it’s a lot like living around Scandinavians, but with less swearing and drinking and more of a sense of humor. They’re good neighbors.

They look after their own, but with a deep obligation to not be a burden on others via dissipation. They are also civic minded (the fundametalist Mormon groups are very different, and hostile to local authorities, and very willing to exploit the system. But they are relatively few in number).

Mesa has acquired some cops who bailed on Minneapolis. It’s not often you get to recruit good mid-career cops so inexpensively.

The “ten squad cars respond to a shoplifter:” He wasn’t embarassed about that. Under Arizona law, if you ask police to come, they’re supposed to come (Phoenix can no longer meet that). He did say that it might be a good idea, once the perp is cuffed, that some of those responding cops should be going back on patrol, rather that having a large bull session.