Rolling the Gold

 That's what we always called it.  Rolling the Gold to identify ourselves as police officers. There was nothing nefarious about it.  In the presence of an officer you did not know, you identified yourself to put him or her at ease.

Evidently, the rules have changed.  It seems that the Chief of Police of Tampa was recently pulled over by a Pinellas County Deputy for a minor infraction.  She identified herself as a police officer and was allowed to proceed. When I say minor, she didn't have a license tag on her golf cart.  That is minor.

I never liked giving traffic tickets, so when I rolled out the citation pad, the time for talk was over.  In my time as a road cop, I probably never wrote more that two dozen tickets.  I made a bunch of traffic stops, but I didn't write many tickets.  If everything seemed reasonable, I'd let the violator go.

But, in this case, it seems like something that broke the camel's back. This violation seems so minor that it should not even have elicited conversation at the station coffee pot.

Suspect Shot

 It seems that another upstanding citizen tried to harm a police officer and got shot for his trouble.  In this case, the suspect will survive to explain his actions before a court.  According to the local station:

Louisiana State Police has taken over the investigation. LSP investigators shared in their initial report that at around 12:30 p.m., APD received a complaint that a man was running into traffic on Rapides Avenue. When an officer got to the area, they came in contact with the man, identified as 34-year-old Jason Shackleford.

According to LSP, Shackleford then initiated a lengthy physical altercation with the officer. During the physical altercation, LSP shared that Shackleford “gained control of the officer’s baton and began choking the officer from behind with the baton.” That’s when the officer fired his gun and shot Shackleford.

Shackleford was transported to a local hospital for treatment. In its update, LSP shared that he was last listed in stable condition. The officer was also transported to a local hospital for treatment, but has since been released.

 Choke an officer, catch a bullet.  It sounds to me like a good shoot.

You might recall that earlier this week, we covered another incident where a suspect tried to disarm an officer and caught a bullet for his trouble. There seems to be a pattern here, and the street idiots need to take both these incidents as object lessons.

West Los Angeles Area OIS 7/7/22 (NRF034-22)

Joe sent me this video of an officer involved shooting in West Los Angeles.  

Fairly standard scenario.  Someone calls in a perp who is waving a knife and scaring passers-by.  Officers respond.  Perp charges cop with knife in hand.  Cop shoots perp. Other officers respond, take perp into custody, take perp to hospital.  Perp declared dead.  Too bad, so sad.

Thanks, Joe.

The Pendulum

 Over at PJMedia, the Morning Briefing talks about the reckoning that large, Democrat led cities are facing after the 2020 summer-of-mostly-peaceful-violence.  In the analysis, Kruiser talks about the Minneapolis PD, which is struggling to retain officers and is currently  He links to a piece by Athena Thorne.

Unless you were in a coma, you heard about the fine, upstanding Minneapolis citizen, George Floyd, who ingested a lethal dose of fentanyl and passed away after fighting with cops and being subdued with one officer’s knee on his neck. Fiery riots and lengthy jail sentences for the officers ensued. Unsurprisingly, two years on, the Minneapolis Police Dept. is more than 100 sworn officers short of the minimum legal requirement of 731. MPD currently employs 629 officers; compare this to the 902 sworn who served there just weeks before the Floyd death.

It's not surprising that when politicians and others vilify police, the agency suffers.  The remaining officers have to work harder to cover what needs to be covered.  If, hypothetically, a city needs 200 sworn officers to cover the patrol zones and investigate crimes, and that department finds itself with 150 officers, something has to be left undone. Police chiefs in those departments are loath to cut officers from politically visible details (Like the Mayor's security detail), so he had to cut somewhere else.

It is rank hypocrisy on th Mayor's part to rail against the police and live under the very umbrella of security that the police provide.  Especially when he (or she) enjoys a personal protection detail.  Yet, that is where many cities find themselves today

Back In The Day

 I was scrolling through Instapundit and saw a picture that reminded me of an old acquaintance.

We called him Skinny.  He was a short statured, black drag queen, who hung around the old Belmont Hotel in Baton Rouge.  At the time I worked as a parole officer in north Louisiana.  When we went to Baton Rouge for training or a conference, we stayed at the Belmont, which was just blocks from the State Police Barracks.

Skinny sold sex fairly cheap, according to the BRPD guys who showed up to arrest him.  He was a frequent flyer at the Baton Rouge jail.  He was such a frequent flyer that when we got to Baton Rouge and he approached us, we would just "roll the gold" (show hi the badge) and he would scamper off.

When I saw that sign, I thought about ol' Skinny.  I wonder whatever happened to him?

Sacramento Shooting

 Drinking coffee on Monday, I click to the news feed and see  that the Sacramento shooting has "prohibited person" written all over it.  The death toll is still at 6, with 12 wounded.  Police Chief Lester says that investigators are continuing to interview witnesses, collect evidence, and are looking for multiple suspects.

Investigators were interviewing a number of witnesses and located hundreds of pieces of evidence from the scene, including a stolen handgun, Lester said.

The first 24 hours are crucial to any investigation of this type. That is not a critique of the officers working this case, it's simply a statement of fact.  After a while, even the best investigator runs out of steam.  After the first 24 hours, it becomes a grind of double-checking and waiting for the labs to process evidence.

This May Get Ugly

t seems ike the mayor of San Francisco has had enough of lawlessness.  Watch the first minute of this report for her comments.

How is she going to get back the hundreds of officers who have retired?  How is she going to establish trust with the police officers on the street?  How will she react the first time a use-of-force incident goes wrong?  What happens when emboldened criminals confront the police?

She has sown, and now she will reap.  This may get ugly before it gets better.

That's A Good Boy

 It seems that there is this dog, a trained working dog named Ballantine, who works for the Dallas PD, in their narcotics section, and is Dallas Love Field.  His job is to sniff out contraband in luggage.  By all accounts, he has an excellent sniffer.  Recently, though, he started a shit-storm when he sniffed out a bag and alerted his handler about contraband.

What was in the bag?  Cash.  Over $100K in cash.

The owner of the hag, a 25-year-old woman from Chicago, was not arrested.  By all accounts, she is not suspected of a crime.  Yet, her money was seized and may be subject to civil asset forfeiture.  Why?  It is not against the law to have cash.  It is not against the law to travel with cash.

I was a cop for a long time, and unless I could articulate a crime, I was unable to make a case.  My agency did not do civil asset forfeiture.

Unless the Dallas PD can articulate a crime that is tied to this money, they should return it to the woman with their abject apology.  Otherwise, they have committed a theft.

Oh, one final thought.  It's not the dog's fault.  He did his job.  Now, it's time for the Dallas PD to do the right thing.

FBI Busts FBI Terror Plot

I used to have a lot of respect for the FBI, but over the past five years, not so much.

When the Babylon Bee starts parodying them, they really need to look at their corporate reputation.  It's shattered and needs t be reformed from top to bottom.

If any FBI agent has any self-respect, it's time to start looking for another agency.  

The Narrative

 I'm sure that you've all heard abut the shooting in Austin early Saturday morning.  Some people were wounded when gunfire erupted on Sixth Street in Austin, which seems to be a nightclub/entertainment area. A bunch of folks were wounded, and a manhunt ensued.  But, the Austin paper didn't want to print a discretion of the suspect.  Because it was too vague.

Editor’s note: Police have only released a vague description of the suspected shooter as of Saturday morning. The Austin American-Statesman is not including the description as it is too vague at this time to be useful in identifying the shooter and such publication could be harmful in perpetuating stereotypes. If more detailed information is released, we will update our reporting.

The description was not particularly vague.  The police said they were looking for a Black male with dreadlocks and a skinny build.   That narrows it down to a specific sub-set of the population.  The police were not looking for a bald, fat, white guy.  And, other folks are starting to notice.

In other words, the Statesman knew that the police knew who the suspects were. If police said the suspects were black, why didn’t the newspaper take the APD at its word? I’ll tell you why: the Statesman wants to perpetuate the fictional narrative that dangerous, gun-toting white supremacist rednecks are roaming the city of Austin, hunting black people.

As it turns out, the police in Austin have made an arrest, and it was a skinny black guy with dreadlocks who was busing caps on Sixth street. But this doesn't fit the preferred narrative and the Austin Statesman had to keep the narrative going or as long as possible.

Arrests

 Don McCollor says in Comments:

 Now that body/car cams are so common, it keeps police honest too. A cameras 'off' or video "missing" should be grounds for dismissal of all charges...

Yeah, let's talk about that.

When I left my last agency in 2019, less than half the officers wore cameras.  And, there is good reason for that.  Storing video is expensive.  It takes a lot of memory space, and it requires a substantial investment of equipment.  And, by far, the least expensive portion is the cameras themselves.  Storage of hours of boring video is part of the equation.  Probably the biggest expense, even higher than server space, is the personnel needed to catalog the video and maintain the equipment. If you have 200 cameras running 12 hours per day, the investment necessary to store and catalog 2400 hours of video every day is staggering.

And, the huge majority of arrests are quite routine.  Which is why we tell officers to not become complacent when making an arrest.  In my 37 year career, I arrested (conservatively) a thousand people.  And, I can only recall a half-dozen or so that went bad on me. I never killed anyone, (thank God), but I was awfully close on two occasions.

The vast majority of arrests are stunningly routine.  The suspect complies, we administer the cuffs and take him or her to jail.  Probably 95 percent, or higher, fall into that category.  Probably one percent or less is a resistive arrest, where the suspect actively resists.  That other percentage is an arrest that comes after an investigation.  Generally for a felony offense where the suspect was not apprehended at the scene.  In this case, the investigators have done their homework, identified a suspect, built a file, obtained warrants, and gone our to arrest the suspect.

Citizens make complaints for a variety of reasons, and in many such situations, there is no basis for the complaint.  I can recall two such complaints in my career where a citizen made a complaint against me, personally, by name. I was able to show, in both cases, that not only was I not at the scene of the complaint, but that at the time in question, I was not even in the parish (county) at the time of the alleged complaint.  One was a case of mistaken identity, where the citizen thought they recognized me at the scene, the other still baffles me.

So, to answer Don's question, should lack of body camera footage be grounds for dismissal of charges?  No, not as a blanket policy.  There is only a tiny percentage of cases where body camera footage calls the conduct of the officer into question.

Body Cameras

 I never used a body camera, not once in 37 years of police work,   They came at the end of my career, and the agency I worked for was just beginning to learn how to best use them (and store millions of gigabits  of video as I was nearing retirement.

I argued against body cameras, because I felt that a police officers word should suffice.  Yet, I've changed my mind, because people who want to mis-use or abuse the police will stop at nothing to achieve their aims.   If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand sentences.

The last fifteen years of my career was spent inthe schools, as a resource officer.  I did good police work during those fifteen years, and there were some times when I did police work that could have benefited from the use of a body camera.  However, I knew that the schools had surveillance cameras and I knew that whatever I had to do was probably captured on one or more of those cameras.

I made good use of those surveillance cameras, saving footage that I thought was appropriate.  They added another layer to the files, and if there was any question, all we had to do was roll the tape.

The left is finding out that camera footage is a good thing.  But not necessarily in a way that they wished.

 Leftists are actually disappointed that body cameras show police officers are NOT oppressing people of color. What we HAVE seen is heroic police work while officers deal with horrific criminal behavior.

Yep.  Good cops should never be afraid of video footage. 

Miranda

 In the discussion below, Bob makes a comment that deserves attention.

If I understand correctly a POI does not have the same protections (wouldn't require Miranda, for instance) a suspect has, and once the genie is out of the bottle, I don't trust the system to protect that non-Mirandized (POI) information from being used. Just too tempting.

We generally Mirandize everyone in one form or another.  There is a misconception that  Miranda only applies if a person is being arrested.  That's not true.  Miranda applies to everyone, all the time.  A citizen is never under any obligation to talk with the police, and applies whenever.  While it is certainly true that each agency has a Miranda form that can be used to document the process, the absence of the form doesn't mean that a person does not have Miranda protections.

Sometimes it is in the person't best interest to talk with us.  Other times it is not.  But, we always start the conversation with "You don't have to tell me anything if you don't want to.", or words to that effect.

YOU ALWAYS HAVE YOUR MIRANDA RIGHTS.  You do not have to talk to the police if you  do not want to.

One example.  In the early 90s I was working a murder investigation.  We had a corpse in a kitchen, in a suburban neighborhood. The coroner set the time of death at Friday night about 6:00 pm.  We found the body on Monday morning.  During the investigation we did a neighborhood canvass.  We knocked on doors asking the neighbors if they had seen anything suspicious on Friday afternoon.  Some folks wanted to talk with us, some folks didn't.  They all had the right to tell us that they didn't want to talk with us.

Everyone has Miranda right, all the time.  The one exception is in what we call a Spontaneous Declaration.  If a person comes up to me, and tells me that they have committed some heinous offense, then I can arrest based on that declaration.  I didn't ask for it, I wasn't looking for it, it just dropped in my lap, and I can use it.  And, you can believe I am going to bring out a Miranda form.

Basic Investigative Terms.

Bob F asks in comments:

 Somewhat related: I have been skeptical of the term "person of interest" since I first heard it. My suspicious mind has always said it was an end run around legalities when a person is officially considered a suspect, the word "suspect" carrying certain obligations. If you would care to opine at some point down the road I'd definitely be interested in learning.

It's simple.  A suspect is someone suspected of a crime.  Why might we suspect that a particular person did a particular crime?  In this day and age, we have video camera everywhere.  Almost any violent crime a person ight commit is generally captured on a video camera of some type.

Back in the day it was a little harder.  For example, in the early to mid 80s I was an investigator, and I got to know the methods used by a certain portion of my criminal element.  There was one career burglar who always went in through the bedroom window, left the screen propped against the house, and always left through the front door.  He stole things that were easy to carry and easy to hock.  If I saw that set of circumstances at a crime scene,  I knew who my suspect was.  He was a guy named Deadeye.  Deadeye always committed burglaries the same way.

A person of interest is not the suspect.  A person if interest is a person who might know the whereabouts of my suspect.  For example, in Deadeye's case, my person of interest was Jerry Wayne.  Jerry Wayne always knew where I might find Deadeye.

In the current case, the cops were looking for a particular Jeep Cherokee.  They knew it was used in the murder of my friend, and they suspected that the vehicle might have evidence inside it.  When they found the car, and stopped it in a traffic stop, the fellow driving it became a person of interest.  As i turns our, he was arrested as and Accessory After The Fact.

As it turns out, I never personally arrested Jerry Wayne, my person of interest.  I arrested Deadeye several times over 20 years and the last I heard from him, he is living in his mother's house and staying out of trouble.  Jerry Wayne died in the early 90s.  Something about a drug deal gone bad and a bullet in his head.I don't know if they ever solved that one.

Person Of Interest

 The Rapides Parish Sheriffs Office has issued an update on the homicide investigation related to the murder of my friend last week.

In the press release, they tell us that they have located the vehicle used in the crime, and that they have detained a "person of interest".  This confuses many people. A Person of Interest may of may not have participated in the crime, but may have information vital to solving it.  In this case, the vehicle was taken in a traffic stop, and the person behind the wheel is someone they want to talk to.  That parson may or may not be arrested, based on the interview that is sure to follow the traffic stop.

My prayer is that Jackson will be apprehended soon and safely.  The best of all outcomes would be for him to appear at the front door of the Courthouse with an attorney and submit to arrest peacefully.  Any other scenario might become very dangerous for everyone involved.

Tucker Carlson Tonight 4/22/22 FULL | Fox Breaking News | April 22, 2021

Tucker does a great job here, showing the insanity of those who would deny that saving a vitim of a street stabbing is somehow a bad thing.  Probably racist.  It's all our collective faults for systemic racism.

This may be the incident where rational Americans wake up and see that the racists among us are not the white cops who are forced to an horrific attack.  This may be the incident where the left and the critical race theorists lose all their credibility.  This was plainly a violent lethal force encounter and the police officer was forced to use his weapon to protect an unarmed person.  He ended the threat, which is just exactly what he is trained to do.

These apologists for mayhem are wrong, and they are wrong on a level that defies reasonableness.

This was a good shoot, an almost perfect use of police power, and anyone who says differently has no credibility.  They should re-examine their entire educational experience, because somewhere their moral compass has gone completely out of calibration.

Knife Fighters

 The unthinking Twitter world (but I repeat myself) is ablaze with unwarranted outrage about another black person shot by a police officer.  However, from everything I've seen, including the bodycam footage, it was  righteous shooting.

The facts are simple.  The police roll up on a disturbance and while trying to figure out what is going on, a young female starts swinging a knife, apparently trying to injure another female nearby.  One shot is fired.  The knife-wielding female drops to the ground.  You can see news coverage here.

Below, a screen grab of what the police officer saw the instant before he fired his weapon.

The knife is plainly in her hand, and she is attacking the person in pink. One shot ended it.

Of course, Columbus, OH, is in turmoil right now.  The agitators have decided to take the side of a knife-wielding idiot who was actively engaged in trying to hurt people over the side of law and order.  The girl's Momma is all over the news, telling us what a sweet person she was.  Maybe Momma should have spent more time on anger-management issues and teaching her not to play with knives.

I have no sympathy for these fools. It was a good shoot, plain and simple.

AG Garland announces civil investigation into Minn...

Biden's AG Garland is announcing a civil investigation against the Minneapolis PD>

He mentioned "behavioral health disabilities".What the hell is that?  Someone who doesn't know how to act right?  That would reflect about 80% of the folks I arrested 

We'd roll up on a house, neighbors in the yard.  "What's going on?"

The neighbor would look at us.  "Mofo crazy."  

I guess that's what we'd call a behavioral health disability.  Mofo Crazy.  Second cousin to Dindu Nuffin.. We'd get another officer or two, swarm him, cuff him and stuff him, then get him up to the jail where we were sure they knew him.

What Happens When The Good Ones Walk Away?

 When I was a police officer, for many of us, it was a calling.  There were those who considered it just a job, but they didn't last long.  For many of us, we knew we were in it for the long haul, and did everything we could to root out the bad cops.  But, we knew that if we made a mistake, or had a bad day, the bosses would stand behind us.  There might be consequences, but generally, we knew that we could rely on our training, our professionalism, and our brothers.

Not so much, anymore.  Every day is career day.  Every day may be the day that your career is over and you go to jail.  So, the question becomes: What will police owrk look like in five years?  Who is going to do the hard work of standing between anarchy and civilization?  What are the politicians going to do when the good ones just walk away?

It's a question that deserves an answer.

Another Goblin Down in Minneapolis

 It seems that there was another "police shooting" in Minneapolis.  The police have released the bodycam footage.

Goblin was an active suspect.

Police order him to show his hands.

Goblin fires gun at police.

Encounter ends like you'd think.  No officers harmed. Goblin deceased.  Democrats demonstrate. Demonstrators demonstrate their inability to understand the Use of Force matrix..

If you point a gun at me, I'm going to shoot you.  Every time. Repeatedly if necessary.