Tuesday, March 23, 2010

This goes beyond 'Sorry excuses for lawmen' and into

'Disgusting bastards who should be in prison'.
Remember the man who was killed by police because he tried to drive away when a bunch of guys in plain clothes and masks jumped out of an unmarked vehicle with guns? And was then accused of various things that had to be dropped? It gets even worse.

Ignore the idiot way this arrest was attempted; ignore the malice of the lies thrown at the dead man to exonerate the cops of their responsibility in his death; get this:
District Attorney Brian Rickman praised the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for going to "very extraordinary lengths" to insure the investigation into the shooting was fair. But Abigail Ayers' civil suit (PDF) calls that assessment into question. The complaint alleges that Officer Harrison, the cop who shot Ayers, wasn't even authorized to arrest him. On the day Ayers was killed, Harrison had yet to take a series of firearms training classes required for his certification as a police officer. More astonishing, Harrison apparently had no training at all in the use of lethal force.

These allegations have since been confirmed by local TV station WSBTV and, after the fact, by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Despite the fact that Harrison had killed a man suspected of no crime months earlier without having undergone lethal-force training and certification, the officer was still carrying his badge and gun up until the time of the WSBTV report. Once the publicity hit, Harrison was suspended. Abigail Ayers' civil suit also alleges prior disciplinary problems with both officers Oxner and Harrison, including alleged drug use
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You, as a plain old citizen, carry without getting permission from the state and kill someone in unquestioned self-defense and they'll put you in prison for not having a permit; this bastard was not a certified officer, had NO privilege to carry a badge at all let alone take part in a mess like this AND THEY LET HIM KEEP CARRYING A BADGE AND GUN AFTER HIS KILLING OF AYERS. I'm going to borrow this bit from Balko's post:
...That a police officer untrained in the use of lethal force and unqualified to be holding a badge and gun was put on a narcotics task force, and then placed in a position where he was able to shoot and kill a non-suspect is worse. But the kicker has to be that the subsequent police-led investigations of this high-profile case failed to turn up such a critical piece of information. It ought to cast more doubt on the already dubious notion that police shootings should only be investigated by other police officers.
Once upon a time I didn't like the idea of non-cops being involved in investigations of LE shootings; I've grown up a lot since that time(I used to trust the FBI to be always professional and fair, too).

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