Aaron Brown

I feel ill:

A few months ago, a close friend of my family was shot and killed in a totally unfortunate and completely avoidable situation at an IHOP. Today, the county released its report which states that the officer won’t be charged with any crime.

What I wrote about it, before.

I read through the entire report, and it’s a decent piece of fact finding. The only part that’s truly abhorrent is the conclusion. The investigation was thorough and seems to have sifted a ton of evidence to come up with what happened that night. The core of it seems to be this:

* The group left with some fraction of their bill unpaid.
* The officer (off duty, working extra hours as IHOP security) ran out, got in front of the jeep, and signaled it to stop.
* The jeep accelerated, swerved, or did something erratic, at which point the officer started firing.
* The first bullet went into the grill, right of center. At this point, the officer was standing “approximately 30 degrees to the left” of the vehicle.
* The second bullet went into the side of the hood.
* The third bullet went through the driver side, rear passenger window
* The fourth, fifth, and sixth bullets trailed out over the rear quarter of the vehicle, with the last one in the drivers side corner of the rear bumper.
* The jeep crashed into parked cars.

So, bad situation:

* Unpaid bill (kids are in the wrong)
* failing to instantly stop at the appearance of an officer (driver in the wrong)
* swerving and accelerating instead (driver very, very much in the wrong)
* officer fires 6 shots from the side of the vehicle, killing the passenger behind the driver (what the fucking hell?)

And now we have, so far as I can tell:

* Alexandria law enforcement closing ranks to defend one of their own.

My impression is that the conclusion is tacked on. It doesn’t fit.

Why is it okay to fire at fleeing dine-and-dash culprits? If I squint really hard, I can see the logic in shooting at the driver of a car that’s barreling at you (at “between 22 and 24 miles per hour”). The reason I have to squint is that:

* The officer put himself in that dangerous position.
* By the time he started firing, he was out of the way of the car
* THE CAR WAS FILLED WITH KIDS

The argument in the report is that it’s not reasonable to expect someone to stop shooting for several seconds after they start. This is exactly why he shouldn’t have started.

Keep in mind that the officer didn’t have to use deadly force here. He could have gotten the license plate. He could have stood to the side. He made a decision to go John Wayne: He jumped in, drew his gun, and perforated the car and our friend. He did this in defense of a $26 bill, at an IHOP where he was working extra hours. The argument in the report is that the shooting was in self defense. This completely ignores the fact that the officer put himself in harms way, got back out of the way, and then decided to fire.

If you’re a police officer, you are expected to control your deadly force. I can sort of see the logic in shooting the driver. I have to squint to see that too (refer to the DC chief of police: “If you think the situation is bad before, try adding a corpse behind the wheel”). Fact is, this officer shot erratically, from the side, shot the wrong person, and endangered the rest. This officer dumped 6 bullets into the side of a vehicle filled with people whose worst crime (excluding the driver) was skipping out on a $26 restaurant tab. That’s critically bad judgement, a failure of training, and a failure of the police to set their priorities at “defending the citizenry” rather than … something else. I don’t know.

If I happened to be an armed vigilante, in a similar situation, if I jumped in front of the vehicle and aerated it as it went past … I would be in prison for, at best, involuntary manslaughter. Nobody would care about my “self defense” argument. If I ran in front of a car, drew a weapon, dodged it, and fired a shots across the whole side, I would be in prison.

The fact that this guy is a police officer does not make it okay to draw and fire on a fleeing car full of 19 year olds. If the conclusion is that “it was legal,” then the law needs to change.

The logic here is the same logic that leads the guy who Cheney shot to apologize for being in the way, and the guards at our lovely Cuban prison to report on prisoner suicides as acts of aggression. It’s an insane, mixed up set of priorities that blames the victim and claims that the only solution is to increase the use of force.

I feel ill.