See also Chris's great post,"Only Ones:" Accountability, ROEs, and Heroism, over at Arma Borealis.
By now it is widely reported that the police in California shot up two vehicles belonging to innocent civilians, wounding two.
As a reminder, the police were looking for a 270 lb black guy in a black nissan pickup.
Read the whole thing!
UPDATE:
Steven Greenhut describes how the Dorner Manhunt Reveals Police Contempt for Public Safety:
Last weekend, police opened fire on a 71-year-old newspaper carrier and her 47-year-old daughter who had the misfortune of driving a pick-up truck police thought might be Dorner’s. The Los Angeles police detectives who opened fire on them, putting two bullets in the older woman’s back, didn’t do much double checking. The carriers' truck was a different make and color from Dorner’s.
As the women’s attorney told the Los Angeles Times: “The problem with the situation is it looked like the police had the goal of administering street justice and in so doing, didn't take the time to notice that these two older, small Latina women don't look like a large black man.” This could be written off as a sad fluke, except that 25 minutes later different officers opened fire on a different truck—once again getting key details wrong. Can’t officers at least check the license plate, and issue a warning, before opening fire?
...
“Simply put, the police culture in our country has changed,” argued former San Jose Police Chief Joe McNamara, a Hoover Institution scholar, in a Wall Street Journal article in 2006. “An emphasis on ‘officer safety’ and paramilitary training pervades today’s policing, in contrast to the older culture, which held that cops didn’t shoot until they were about to be shot or stabbed.”
Courtesy of a great hat tip and summation by the Instpaundit, who writes:
Nope. An armed citizen who acted this way would be in jail now. Except that armed citizens seldom act this way.
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