Do not get fresh with police officers.
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It’s only five million bad apples.
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Not sure what the laws are there. But in my state officers are not allowed to brandish a weapon while off duty. Additionally they cannot simply say “I’m a police officer” without identifying themselves with a badge.
How the hell would anyone KNOW he’s a cop. Dude just whips out a gun like a freaking asshole. AND LOADS A ROUND.
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Thats true. What if that guy had bought a bottle of coke at the same time?
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Yeah, those coke bottles are intimidating as hell. Added gif to prove my point.
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I mean come on… The guy looks like a badass, especially with that raging beard. And this cop has probably seen plenty of TV shows and movies where badasses suddenly start shooting everything around them. It’s only logical to assume that real life is just like the movies, and every dude who looks like a badass is about to commit homicide.
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There are only a few bad apples. The rest are decent, honorable men who defend the bad apples, and cover for them, and show up in court in their uniforms to stare silently at jurors when the bad apples are on trial.
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there is no sense of proportion in response anymore, a stolen candy bar or refusing to stop can result in death. smdh.
What i don’t get is this cops utter lack of situational assessment skills.
he knew the guy had put money on the counter and taken mints from same counter…not stuffed them in his pocket in the candy isle. you don’t steal something you’ve placed on the counter in front of the clerk to pay for after you’ve exchanged money for the item, that isn’t how it works.
mint thieves very seldom pay money, it kinda wrecks the thieving part and makes them just regular law abiding customers.
also the “hey thief, make sure to take the money you just paid and leave?” bit was weird. like he didn’t even get what he was saying. the only thing i can think of that makes any sort of sense is he thought the guy was paying for gas and stealing mints? wtf. while i guess that possibly happens, but how he handled it makes zero sense. he should have asked the cashier before making any assumptions and could have confronted the guy peacefully and questioned him first.
That guy really did look like a badass and wears the hell out of that beard, but he also looks respectable and clean-cut at the same time. it is too bad he had to deal with that.
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My best guess is that the cop was triggered by the customer reaching across the counter to take the mints, possibly because the clerk scanned the mints then put them down on his side of the counter, possibly intending to push them across once he had put the money in the till. But for the price of the mints, the customer was probably doing the clerk a favor by just reaching across and taking them.
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When I’ve paid for an item, and the cashier is making change, I assume that the item on the counter is mine to do with as I please.
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Yes, me to.
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Over mints.
This man pulled a gun on someone over mints.
This man created an all-too-familiar scenario in which someone ends up dead over a tin of mints.
This man was willing to pick up the extrajudicial gavel of death and wield it at someone over some compressed, flavored sugar tablets.
That were already paid for.
The Arreolas told CBS2 they don’t want the officer fired, but that they do want him to get better training. [source]
That’s gracious and admirable. I still want to see him fired and replaced by somebody receptive to better training.
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The Widowmaker.
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“However, because there is an ongoing personnel investigation and potential litigation pending against the city, I am unable to discuss the details of our investigation.”
“Rest assured, however,” he added, " that we will seriously consider giving the officer anywhere from 3 to 6 paid days off to think about what he’s done."
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nah fuck that pig
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The weird part to me (european, but I did live in the US for a few years …), is that he doesn’t produce a badge. That’s kinda what we expect, no?
In my head, that’s how it’s meant to work. pulls out badge, “surprise, I’m a cop!”, whoops, busted. He pulls out a gun as his symbol of authority instead. That’s troubling. Not least in the direct “threatening someone’s life over candy”, but that it makes it feel like the officer sees their authority represented by their service weapon, not their badge. That’s rule by force - we do rule by consent.
(I mean, even in the ‘lethal weapon’ movies they waved their badges around like it meant something. Either they no longer mean something, the gun means what the badge used to, or this action was less professional than a ‘lethal weapon’ movie. And that’s setting a low, low bar.)
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As another outsider my gut feel about US culture is that the gun confers authority, while symbols of established authority (badges) are considered secondary. Maybe much of the debate around gun ownership comes down to a conflict between customary and officially sanctioned authority.
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I think this is the key part of this story. That he felt lethal force the normal part of doing the simplest piece of police work. I wonder what the narrative would be if a “good guy with a gun” had walked in, and with the kind of automatic lethal response we see here and we’ve become accustomed to, shot the “dude” holding the employee and customer at gunpoint?
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The guy is damn lucky he didn’t have Skittles. Sweet jeezuz this country is fucked up.
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