A Chicago Police officer responding to a ShotSpotter alert fired shots at a child who was playing with fireworks—that’s the conclusion from the Civilian Office of Police Accountability in a statement released today.
“COPA can confirm that a firearm was not used against the officers,” said COPA First Deputy Chief Administrator, Ephraim Eaddy.
CPD initially identified the child as a man, claiming he had opened fire first.
They also reported seeing “flashes of light.”
“When officers arrived in the area, they observed an individual, who has now been identified as a juvenile, standing near a residence. As one officer exited the vehicle, they heard a loud bang, which was later determined to be fireworks. The officer who exited the vehicle discharged their firearm in the direction of the juvenile, who was not struck by gunfire,” investigators state in the press release about the incident.
Body-worn camera footage from the three officers responding to the ShotSpotter alert appears to show one officer immediately fire his gun after hearing a loud bang.
He then yells, “Shots fired! Shots fired!” as another officer radios in a “10-1,” indicating officers are in need of urgent assistance.
Doesn't help that being a cop unironically requires less training then the vast majority of other jobs. You would think giving someone a gun to point at people, who they're largely supposed to "protect" would require at least a few years of training.
Notably, a cosmetologist requires 2-3 times more training than police officers in the US. The only two countries with lower training requirements are Iraq and Afghanistan. Stories like this post, the acorn incident, and shooting into that ladies house, start to make a lot more sense with that context, eh?
I have a take on the cosmetologist thing! Sounds silly for a hair cutting job, doesn't it?
Dated a woman who trained cosmetologists at the local college. Gods she was educated.
Thinking out loud one night I said, "Ugh. What's it called when a chemical reaction... uh... opposite of exothermic?"
"Endothermic."
"How the hell you know that?!"
Turns out when you fuck with people's bodies, you have to know some shit. Forgot the topic, but I had asked her how she knew another odd thing.
"Because old people may have nails (whatever, I forgot), and you have to recognize that as a sign of (whatever, I forgot). You cannot use $chemical on them."
Anyway, off topic, but there are reasons cosmetologists are trained and certified. They're certainly more educated than most cops.
Tamir Rice
You won't find me defending cops in my comment history, but the acorn thing was a wild outlier. Which is why it made news and we're laughing at memes about it. Holy shit. Never saw anything like that in life.
It's only an outlier of you only consider cases of cops being spooked by acorns specifically. I mean this is literally a thread about a cop being spooked into opening up because of fireworks. Cops getting scared who then just start blasting is a pretty common occurrence it would seem, at least compared to how often it should be happening, which is very rarely to never.
A cop pointed a gun at Aaron Bushnell as he collapsed while burning to death. The cops have a trigger happiness problem. They don’t know how to handle themselves around guns. The acorn thing wasn’t an outlier at all. It was just the most fucking absurd example of an ongoing problem. First sign of trouble means they’re ready to shoot someone—and because they’re told they need to avoid lawsuits for injuring people, that means they’re ready to fucking kill at the first sign of trouble.
To elaborate further, it requires less, as in police forces have won lawsuits to specifically hire under-qualified applicants. It's not just a quirk of a unstructured administration - it is their goal.
They're there to protect the system, not the people.
I had the idea (source: fictional TV) that ALL cops had to be trained at a police academy before becoming cops. That’s not the case?
I mean yeah, they do, but police academies in real life are hardly the solemn and rigorous institutes of higher learning they're portrayed as in the Police Academy movies.
There are 18,000 police departments in the US. We can't talk about them as a monolithic entity.
There might be 2 local dudes, there might be 10,000, training varies wildly by city and state, let alone for federal officers.
I'd be down for some sort of federal minimum requirements, but now we're into sticky state's rights arguments. (And yes, like it or not, our states have wide latitude for self-governance. It's a big dammed country.)
Training is where they learn to shoot first ask questions later
Yeah I am getting real tired of centrists acting like the training is the solution not the problem.
The “training” is an indoctrination into an ideological system designed to uphold racial and socio-economic disparities through the use of violent force and to act otherwise is to blatantly ignore the history of policing in the United States.
The cop fired at the acorn because he was an idiot and probably wasn’t well trained, but more importantly the cop fired on the acorn because inside his rotten little mind are vivid images of dangerous black men threatening him at every corner and he was sure like a child walking through the dark that the monster was justttt about to jump out at him. This kind of ideology is fundamental to police culture in the US, it cannot be corrected with retraining because it is a basic worldview and causes an incredible amount of violence towards innocent people.
ACAB
That is the case. For full time police officers typically it'll be something like half a year in an academy followed by another half a year on the job with a field training officer.
Hell I’m just some dumbass trainer and I’ve had to go through continuing training myself for almost 4 years now and all I do is talk to people all day and teach them how to use tools like a ticketing system.