Sunday, November 27, 2011

LVRJ Hit Piece On Valley Cops

The Las Vegas Review Journal has begun a 5 day hit piece on Las Vegas Valley cops and the shootings they have been involved.
While they rightfully look into some questionable shootings, they also bring in Monday morning quarterbacks who say they would do something different than the cops who did the shooting. Of course these Monday morning quarterbacks have had at least a couple of years to think about the shootings while the officers only had mere seconds or less to decide whether to shoot or not.
One example: Police are often reluctant to second-guess the actions of another officer, at least publicly. But some cases split the thin blue line just as they do the public.
One such case was the 2009 fatal shooting of 15-year-old Tanner Chamberlain.
Wayne Peterson, a former Las Vegas police homicide lieutenant, said he would not have pulled the trigger on the mentally ill teenager, who was holding a knife in front of his mother when Las Vegas officer Derek Colling shot him in the head.
"I couldn't live with myself," Peterson said of the thought. The killing, one of two by Colling, was ruled justified by a Clark County coroner's inquest jury.
http://www.lvrj.com/news/deadly-force/always-justified/to-shoot-or-not-shoot-is-quandary-for-veteran-rookie-officers-134253878.html
Are you kidding me? The thug who got killed was holding a knife to his mom's head. No one there, even the mother, knew what was going to happen. What if the thug kid slit his mother's throat? Then everyone would be saying that the cops didn't do enough. Further, the kid had many chances to put down the knife and he didn't.
Now, there have been some questionable shootings like the Trevon Cole and Erik Scott shootings and the shooting in Henderson that killed the wife of an ice cream man- those shootings I did have problems with and still do.
But the LVRJ has decided to rip all Valley cops and that is wrong. 99% of the shootings are completely justified and less than 1% questionable.
Being a cop in Vegas is a tough job and now the LVRJ just made it tougher.

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