I know my friends with minimum wage theater jobs at an amusement park said the first thing they learned was that you never aim a gun at anyone at any time, even if it’s loaded with blanks. Not just because someone might have screwed up and loaded real bullets but a fragment of the blank or some other piece of metal from the gun could be fired out regardless.
Weird shit sometimes happens and brings tragic consequences.
Also this:
Particularly crazy:
Dude might not have even died if NBC hadn’t canned his (fairly successful) last big show, Voyagers!, to try to compete with 60 Minutes. (They did not succeed in that endeavor)
After responding to a report of a domestic incident on May 6 in Weirton, W.Va., then-Weirton police officer Stephen Mader found himself confronting an armed man.
Immediately, the training he had undergone as a Marine to look at “the whole person” in deciding if someone was a terrorist, as well as his situational police academy training, kicked in and he did not shoot.
“I saw then he had a gun, but it was not pointed at me,” Mr. Mader recalled, noting the silver handgun was in the man’s right hand, hanging at his side and pointed at the ground.
Mr. Mader, who was standing behind Mr. Williams’ car parked on the street, said he then “began to use my calm voice.”
“I told him, ‘Put down the gun,’ and he’s like, ‘Just shoot me.’ And I told him, ‘I’m not going to shoot you brother.’ Then he starts flicking his wrist to get me to react to it.
“I thought I was going to be able to talk to him and deescalate it. I knew it was a suicide-by-cop” situation.
Mader was responding to a 911 call from Williams’s girlfriend. In that call, she told police that Williams was threatening to kill himself, not anyone else.
What Mader did upon arriving at the scene is a hell of a lot braver course of action than simply opening fire when the suspect doesn’t immediately disarm. What Mader did is in fact exactly what we want cops to do when someone is in crisis. It’s also precisely what law enforcement officers say they do on a daily basis — put themselves at risk in order to save lives. Mader should have been given a medal.
The Weirton police department then refused to name Williams for three days and assigned an investigator to look into the shooting . . . who then promptly left for a weeklong vacation. Then came the punchline.
Mr. Mader — speaking publicly about this case for the first time — said that when he tried to return to work on May 17, following normal protocol for taking time off after an officer-involved shooting, he was told to go see Weirton Police Chief Rob Alexander.
In a meeting with the chief and City Manager Travis Blosser, Mr. Mader said Chief Alexander told him: “We’re putting you on administrative leave and we’re going to do an investigation to see if you are going to be an officer here. You put two other officers in danger.”
Mr. Mader said that “right then I said to him: ‘Look, I didn’t shoot him because he said, ‘Just shoot me.’ ”
On June 7, a Weirton officer delivered him a notice of termination letter dated June 6, which said by not shooting Mr. Williams he “failed to eliminate a threat.”
Even the rare cop who gets fired often gets to keep his pension. Mader won’t be getting one.
Not sure why it’s only implied by a couple sentences and not explicitly stated in that article but one of the other officers did end up shooting and killing Williams.
There’s two ways to look at this.
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Officer Mader’s refusal to shoot Williams with the gun was a violation of the rules. The rules were designed to keep officers safe in dangerous situations, and the fact that it turned out to have been an unloaded gun was beside the point. The department is firing Mader because they can’t violate their own policy, and to make an example of Mader so everyone knows the SOP is serious business.
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Officer Mader’s refusal to shoot Williams is a violation of The Code. The Code was designed to keep officers safe from prosecution and the department shielded from investigation, and fact that the other officer did shoot and kill the gunman is very relevant because Mader’s actions put a spotlight on the incident. The department is firing Mader because they can’t violate the The Code, and to make an example of Mader so everyone knows the The Code is serious business.
What’s kind of sad here is… I don’t know why anyone continues to call the police if they want the person they’re calling about to remain alive.
Or their pets or anyone in the area really.
Well, they don’t shoot you if you’re white, generally.
Well, according to at least one department, they’ll TRY to shoot you if you’re white, but only if you’re next to a black guy. But don’t worry—they’ll “accidentally” hit the black guy.
Nah, they only try to shoot white guys if they are severely autistic.
Dial 911 and Die came out in 1999!
The saddest stories are the ones that start out: “loved one calls police about a person who is a danger to himself.”
I just can’t imagine watching a loved one threaten themselves or others and calling the police. I don’t actually distrust the police in general, but the very idea of me picking up the phone and dialing 911 for a situation like that today would feel like I just sentenced them to death.
Pretty much.
You guys should stop talking about this, and shut up, because all lives matter and everything is fine.
I see what you did there.*
*Kudos BTW
No, not really.
That kid kind of demonsrtated the difference in how white kids are treated, given how much restraint was used before he got shot.
Same result though.