Friday, November 12, 2010

Gene Simmons is Big Cat's role model:

Tuesday, November 02, 2010

Slightly more information on the shooting of a knife wielding man

This weekend this happened. The deceased is a former client of mine (more frequently rep'd by other attorneys in the office) and former client of Huevos's outfit. The article gets the gist of the story. As you can see by the comments, it provokes one of two very standard responses: 1. of course the cop shot the guy and it was the right thing to do (the vast majority of commenters) or 2. cop was too quick on the trigger when other avenues of resolving the situation may have existed. So here's the little more info

The deceased was essentially and old drunk (one of his former lawyers said "anyo cop whose afraid of sam needs to find another line of work") but one who would often ramp up the stakes of the usual drunken brawling, including the agg assault where he was found guilty of a misdemeanor just a couple weeks ago. Most of his cases involved some combination of alcohol and seemingly excessive agression. But he never seriously injured anybody. On the other hand, Al Sharpton's not going to roll into the ATH to protest the tragic loss of his innocent life.

The officer has frequently worked patrolling public housing areas, admittedly hard work. However, he consistently pushes the envelope (to put it mildly) of what is/is not a legal search. More importantly, he has always been someone who escalates situations, taking situations that may be tense and making them more tense. Cops are frequently in tense situations, and they either escalte or de-escalate them. This guy consistently does the former. The shooting of the dog that is mentioned (not the one where he is injured, which seems fairly reasonable) actually involved a friend of my co-worker. In that case, it is undisputed that the dog weighed 30 pounds. The owners (my co-workers friend) say the dog slipped out by pushiing on a screen door and was a totally non-agressive dog. In any event, the truth is a 30 lb dog (half the size of my own medium sized dogs) can be dealt with in about nine different ways short of killing it. So shooting the 30 lb dog seems extremely dicey.

So in the end, whoever's right and whoever's wrong, it's really about the least surprising situation possible. It was Sam being Sam and Lou being Lou, and the odds are they were both moving inevitably towards this moment or one like it.