Originally Posted by
Slider
I don't know which way to look at this. First off, they were responding to a suspect armed with a gun, and that shots had been fired. From the article
Bystanders who called 911 about Elena-Lopez offered contradictory information. One caller incorrectly said he was armed with a gun and had fired shots.
So, from the information the police had (from the 911 call) when they arrived at the scene, they had an active shooter, and went in with that mindset. If there had been an active shooter, would everyone have been screaming if they strolled in NOT ready for that? Once they got there, then yes, they saw an armed assailant who had already injured two women, as it states in the article. But, they also apparently gave no orders for the suspect to get down, they just opened fire on him. Not really buying that, every time I have witnessed police go after someone, even someone who is armed, they are shouting orders to drop the weapon, get down, etc. Just going in and immediately opening fire is something that is very likely to end up with the officer involved being charged by the DA, unless they can clearly show that the suspect was firing at them or someone else when they arrived.
The other part, the young girl that got shot? Yeesh, that is a nightmare. First off, an officer is responsible for any bullet he fires from the end of the barrel, to wherever it ends up stopping. Pretty much black letter law there. But, in the officers defense, the article also says
Soledad Peralta said at a Tuesday press conference that her daughter locked the changing room door as the chaos unfolded “to try to protect us,” and that the pair hugged and prayed until they “felt an explosion that threw us both to the ground.”
Unless the officer that fired that bullet had x-ray vision, there is literally no way that he could have known anyone was in that changing room. It's not like they have glass walls, that would sort of defeat the purpose of a changing room, you think? What is also stated is that the police fired 3 shots from a rifle at the suspect. No mention is made of how many of those rounds hit the suspect, or very possibly, went through the suspect and then possibly struck the girl. You are trained to always check what is behind your target for just this reason. Not saying that is the case, but it certainly could have happened. A 5.56 is capable of penetrating a human and a standard drywall both, particularly at close range, as seems to be the case in this incident.
Going to be hard to prove racial bias as a reason the little girl got shot, if there was no conceivable way for him to even see her, or know she was in the changing room. Still that would suck to have happen for everyone involved.
One of the reasons NYC stopped making the NYPD fire warning shots, is because of a little known law of physics (at least among politicians apparently) that what goes up, must come down. But the policy, handed down from the City, was every officer had to fire a "warning shot" into the air before they were allowed to shoot at a suspect. And after it caused several deaths from those warning shots fired, and subsequent lawsuits that the city lost when some little old lady two blocks over got killed by said bullet coming back down to Earth. (Literally.) The policy was changed for some reason. No idea why. /s.
