As the years go by, I have become more and more critical of the police. And that’s because more and more of them seem to have ego and control problems.
This, however, appears to be just an honest mistake on the part of the cops. The stopped family deserves a written letter of apology from the city, and a settlement for the unnecessary stress they were put through. I’d say $50,000 would do.
I picked a relatively high number there due to the word “unnecessary”.
Who wants to be a cop these days?
“As the years go by, I have become more and more critical of the police. And that’s because more and more of them seem to have ego and control problems.”
Seems to me that it should be because the police departments across America have been decimated and deliberately destroyed by Leftism policies. Anything from mandated vaccines during the Covid fiasco to “defund the police” actions and demonizing every white officer that exists on the assumption that they are racist.
Most of the officers that were good at their jobs have, by now, retired or quit the force... and for very good reason. What we have now, for the most part, are the dregs. A predictable, if not intentionally orchestrated by the left, outcome.
Why are you so stingy giving away taxpayer money?
I say $50,000,000. Each.
The problem is when mistakes, honest or otherwise, are made by people empowered with the means of lethal force. Some professions have much smaller margins for mistakes than others, and I say that as a former US Army military police captain and the son of a retired municipal cop from the Pittsburgh suburbs.
“Honest” mistake and that’s it? There is no excuse for an “honest” mistake that subjects a family to possible death or the trauma they suffered. The cop should be fired and both the cop and city should be sued for everything the cop has a big chunk of change from the city. Your attitude is a BIG part of the problem. “Oh well, we made a mistake. Sorry about that”.
“As the years go by, I have become more and more critical of the police.”
Me too..and I used to be one. Nowadays they presume everyone ..except fellow cops..to be low life criminal scum and act accordingly.
Hmm…what I got from the article is that the plate number came back as invalid for AZ (I.e., not on file?) and the officer ASSUMED the car was stolen because it was a Charger, etc as detailed in the article. At that point, the officer initiates the stop and calls for back up because it may be a high risk apprehension.
Where the process went wrong was during the four minutes the officer sat in the patrol car while waiting for backup. It was an ideal time to run the plate again just to double check. Had that happened, the error would have been discovered beforehand and the high risk traffic stop call cancelled. Since units were probably already rolling, they might have all shown up anyway. But the tension level would have been dialed down very significantly.
The article says that the error was discovered ten minutes after the high risk stop had begun. Who decided to check again? When had the recheck been initiated? What caused the recheck to be initiated?