by KaiserJeep » Tue 16 Dec 2014, 08:08:12
Cops are people too, not automatons. There is a flip side to this coin.
After 10+ years experience in the US Army as a Military Policeman in Germany and the USA, my brother joined the Wisconsin State Patrol 20+ years ago. He went to the academy then rode around in a patrol car with his training sergeant. Within 2 years he was fired for failure to draw his weapon and use deadly force in accordance with policy.
The circumstances were he was one of several officers enforcing weight limits on heavy trucks. He would stop a truck and ask for the paperwork that said that they had been weighed within the state. He would always call for backup whenever he did so, in accordance with policy.
Three times when backup arrived, they found him involved in a fistfight with a truck driver. The first two times, they reprimanded him and gave him remedial training, plus desk duty until all visible evidence of the fistfight had healed. The third time, they fired him for failure to draw his weapon and make an arrest in accordance with policy.
20+ years later he can finally discuss this and says they were entirely justified. He spent most of that 20+ years as a truck driver in Wisconsin, and married to a State Patrol dispatcher. However he spent a few years before changing his mind bitterly complaining that he was fired for "not being trigger happy enough".
I'm of the opinion that he should never have been a cop. He was always looking for a fight when we were growing up. But a cop has to enforce policy, including department policy about the use of deadly force, and not indulge his own whims. If the internal investigation in Sydney agrees with what you saw, the on-scene commander should be disciplined, or possibly fired.
Note however that sniper is a specialty skill and requires special equipment. If there was not time to get the trained person and long gun on site for the takedown, then there are extenuating circumstances. There have been many incidents here in the USA where a sniper was needed, but the local police force had none, and had to wait hours for one from the State Police to do the job. The prime cause of such problems is an inadequate police budget.
KaiserJeep 2.0, Neural Subnode 0010 0000 0001 0110 - 1001 0011 0011, Tertiary Adjunct to Unimatrix 0000 0000 0001
Resistance is Futile, YOU will be Assimilated.
Warning: Messages timestamped before April 1, 2016, 06:00 PST were posted by the unmodified human KaiserJeep 1.0