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sjfcontrol wrote:

Excaliber wrote:Well, I see why no one has been able to point me to the source of the assertion that 11% of police shootings involve an innocent victim while only 3% of citizen shootings do the same. I had to look high and low to find it.

Here's where it apparently comes from:

It is cited in Gun Facts 6.0 . The "fact" appears on page 28 where it says:

"Fact: 11% of police shootings kill an innocent person - about 2% of civilian shootings kill an innocent person."

The footnote references a paper titled Shall Issue: The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws by Clayton Cramer and David Kopel. That paper was published in 1994. On page 41 it says:

Another study examined newspaper reports of gun incidents in Missouri, involving police or civilians. In this study, civilians were successful in wounding, driving off, capturing criminals 83% of the time, compared with a 68% success rate for the police. Civilians intervening in crime were slightly less likely to be wounded than were police. Only 2% of shootings by civilians, but 11% of shootings by police, involved an innocent person mistakenly thought to be a criminal.

The short version is that this statistic, which would be truly startling if it were a national figure and true today, actually came from a single study in a single state at least 18 years ago. It was never true nationally, and a lot of things have changed in the 18 intervening years.

This is a good illustration of why it is important to provide source references when we cite statistics in our posts. It lets others evaluate where the data comes from and determine if it is of any use or not. Posting statistics without sources so has a high potential for misleading others, which I'm sure no one on this Forum would deliberately do.

Don't you know that 72% of all statistics are made up on the spot?

And that 56% of those are wrong.

speedsix wrote:...I agree about the dash cam facts..
...as to the dispatch/caller problem...I know both sides of it...from 40 years ago and the last ten years...
...in the 70s, land lines and radio w/o computers were it...caller called in...dispatcher asked/relayed whatever they thought of...if I had $1 for every gun call I went on without any info on the presence of a gun being passed on to me...I'd be off the rest of the year...sometimes the caller told and the dispatcher failed to relay...sometimes it just didn't come up in the call at all...we'd commonly chew the dispatcher out on the radio for not passing CRITICAL info to us..."pouting" at officers on the street in the middle of the night was common...and dangerous...

...since I have lived where I do...94...I have called both 911 and the non-emerg. number many times, given the dispatcher(same switchboard answers both numbers) proper and detailed information...answered all questions...spelled and repeated...and the officer got there with only an address and name...no details whatsoever...or details that didn't come up in the conversation at all...but the dispatcher "read into" what was said...I've had the Chief's sec'y and the call center supv go back and read the tapes...verifying everything I said right down to attitudes and tone of voice...and it goes on...one day, it'll get an officer killed, or into a career-ruining situation without necessary info...
...I believe the solution to the problem is to have the officers on the street rotate into the call center for a week at a time, and therefore have street-experienced ops asking AND PASSING ON the necessary info, fully realizing how important accuracy and details are to the man out there in the street...but it will seldom happen due to budget/personnel problems...so the guys out there pick up the tab...and do the best they can with what they're given...just like 40 years ago...some departments are better...some are worse...

...this case, unless the dispatcher added considerably to what the 911 caller clearly said...did not justify what was done...period...if the dispatcher turned what the caller is recorded as saying into a situation where the officer was justified in doing what he did...they would have made a big deal about firing the dispatcher to put it to rest...and both the 911 incall and the dispatched info are recorded in the system...when all is said and done, this one will be on the shoulders of the responding officer...even though he was given the wrong address...

Amen about rotating field personnel into the dispatch center, and have the dispatchers ride along as frequently so they can appreciate how hard it is to copy when they talk fast, mumble, jumble, and otherwise make it tough to understand. It's tough enough being out there in emergency mode without adding in trying to understand someone whose headset is a couple of inches too far from their mouth and they sound like they have a mouth full of breakfast.

Years of experience as a fireman and a little as a cop. When I was a cop, my first job was to be the "desk officer" at our little HQ, and run the radio. The "Chief" ( a lieutenant in the NYS State Park Police) told me, at the end of the season, that he would have loved to hire me just as a dispatcher because of my radio presence. Lots of years as a ham radio operator and my father's overbearing influence.

And then there is the callers that get it all garbled and worse.

matriculated wrote:

jimlongley wrote:In my 28 years as a telephone man, I was bitten several times on the job. Company rules forbade my suing even in the most egregious situations, such as when I told the owner that the (barking, growling, scrabbling to get out of owner's arms) dog had to be put in another room while I was there. She insisted her little miniature poodle was no threat to anyone, and as soon as I got inside the house, she turned the dog loose from the kitchen, and it ran over and bit me on the knee. By the time I got to the hospital to get the wound cleaned and stitched, and the hospital, following protocol reported the bite to animal control, she had called the VP complaint line at the phone company, and lodged an official complaint about me slamming a door on her dog. Guess who wound up in trouble?

I have backed down a lot of dogs and I have been cornered, and I have been surprised and bit on the butt (twice, in vastly different situations) and I have given the speech about putting the dog in another secure area more times than I can count.

I still think the officer did wrong, particularly considering the timing of the shooting.

People are just stupid sometimes. I'm sure that poodle attack wasn't a life threatening event, but it cost you time, energy, money, and getting in trouble at your job. All because of a stubborn customer who wouldn't follow common sense. I have three harmless dogs who have never (nor would they ever) bitten anyone, but they do yap a lot (especially the little ones) and they get annoying to a stranger real quick, so whenever I have somebody in my house repairing anything, all 3 of them are locked away behind closed doors. For everyone's sanity.

By the way, did you really slam the door on the lady's poodle? Just curious. Was that while it was still attached to your leg?

No, I didn't slam the door on her dog, but I did depart the house quickly, with blood running down my leg and drops hitting all over the floor and front steps, while she loudly declaimed that her dog hadn't bitten me, that I had done the injury myself, despite the fact that she was standing right there when the dog bit me.

My boss went to her house to investigate and told me that by the time he got there, the front steps and walk had been very thoroughly washed, and the lady told him that I had been very rude, that I had refused to fix her phone, and that when her poor dog sniffed at my boot when she opened the door to let me in, I had kicked at the dog and slammed the door on it. This had caused the dog to lose control of its bladder all over the front steps, which was why they were freshly washed.

The amount of blood in the cab of my truck, where I applied a dressing to control the bleeding, made it obvious that I had to have bled a lot getting there, but the lady wouldn't let my boss inside to do the repair, probably so he couldn't look around. The dog nailed that little arterial that passes on the outside of the knee and around the front, the one that makes a knee injury when roller skating look like a major bloodbath. It was kind of comedic, she started saying the dog hadn't bitten me before I even started bleeding, I wondered if she thought she was hypnotizing me.

A Sheriff's department detective friend of mine did a little looking into her for me, when I was considering suing and before I was told it was against company rules to do so, and found out that her dog had been turned in for chasing and biting people several times, when it got loose as she answered the door, and the Sheriff's department had told her that she was on her third strike, which explains a little of her attitude, but even considering that I never could figure out why she let it out of the kitchen when she knew it was likely to attack. The Sheriff's decided to count the bite as a half bite because it occurred in her home, but the next time it happened, the dog got loose and bit a kid next door, they took the dog from her and destroyed it.

Her letter and the complaint investigation stayed in my file, as well as one from me explaining my side, until I was promoted to staff and had access to all of the employees' files, and then it mysteriously disappeared.

I also count the Chihuahua that bit my boot and worried at it for a few minutes without even coming close to drawing blood as a bite, just one of the more minor ones.

VMI77 wrote:It's amazing isn't it? ....letter carriers, deliverymen, repairmen, meter readers, all manage to routinely enter property where there are dogs, and they never shoot them --basically, because you can't run a business and get away with shooting people's dogs. The police shoot dogs for one reason....they can....there are no consequences, so they get away with it. If, for example, the city, or whatever government agency, had to cough up a cool million to animal rescue groups every time they killed a dog like this --due to their own negligence-- these kinds of dog killings would cease over night. Or take a chunk of change right out of the budget of the offending department.....the incentive of the police is shoot a dog rather than accept any risk of attack, however small, because it costs them nothing when they make a mistake.

In my 28 years as a telephone man, I was bitten several times on the job. Company rules forbade my suing even in the most egregious situations, such as when I told the owner that the (barking, growling, scrabbling to get out of owner's arms) dog had to be put in another room while I was there. She insisted her little miniature poodle was no threat to anyone, and as soon as I got inside the house, she turned the dog loose from the kitchen, and it ran over and bit me on the knee. By the time I got to the hospital to get the wound cleaned and stitched, and the hospital, following protocol reported the bite to animal control, she had called the VP complaint line at the phone company, and lodged an official complaint about me slamming a door on her dog. Guess who wound up in trouble?

I have backed down a lot of dogs and I have been cornered, and I have been surprised and bit on the butt (twice, in vastly different situations) and I have given the speech about putting the dog in another secure area more times than I can count.

I still think the officer did wrong, particularly considering the timing of the shooting.

Keith B wrote:Very sad situation. My sympathy goes out to your friend. Not able to see exactly where the dog was in relation to the officer, but that shot definitely was taken awfully quickly. My gut says he overreacted big time to the dog coming to investigate and then tried to cover it with his blaming your friend for not getting his dog, when in reality your friend had not even had time to process what was going on and react himself. This is one time when the dash cam audio will be an asset for your friend to prove liability on the city.

In the one video, at second 45, the officer says "Hey Wh??? SHOW ME YOUR HANDS, SHOW ME YOUR HANDS, GET YOUR DOG" and then BANG! at second 49, and then shortly thereafter he can be heard whining "Why didn't you get your dog?" as if he had actually given the owner time to react to the first "SHOW ME YOUR HANDS" much less to anything else.

If a CHL pulled a gun on someone, and then shot their dog, I wonder what they would be charged with?