TexasCHLforum.com

VMI77 wrote:

talltex wrote:

texanjoker wrote:

A burglary alarm call is way to common, and in my experience of going to hundreds of false residential alarms, a true waste of tax payer resources. Many larger cities are stopping the response all together unless there is something more. It is always the home owner setting it off accidentally. I cannot even recall ever responding to a valid residential alarm. Regarding experience, you are going to get whatever two units are available. If they were on their own, they are out of the training car and respond to calls accordingly. That is how it works everywhere. If something comes up, then a supervisor or senior officer will respond to assist if warranted.

I read some postings in here about the wrong address. It is easy to not find the correct address in the dark. Many people have poor if no lighting, and do not have their address displayed in a visible manner. When responding to calls like this, you want the element of surprise and are not going to spot light each house to find an address because you have to treat each alarm as a potential valid alarm. Everybody should take the time and make sure they have it on their house. One day you may need EMS and the extra time they take trying to find the house could be deadly.

I agree that having PD responding to alarm calls is a huge waste of taxpayer money...all that does is support the companies that sell the alarm systems, and provide the purchasers with a false sense of security. I also agree with your comments on experience...in an ideal world it'd be nice to always have an older more experienced officer on the scene, but that's not realistic, and at some point the rookies have to be cut loose on their own. Anytime something like this happens, you can always wonder if more experience might have made a difference, but we will never know. As to the wrong address...there I will take issue...the officers have the duty and responsibility to make SURE they are at the right location BEFORE they take any aggressive action, period. The risks to both the homeowner and the officers are just too high to do otherwise. If they have ANY doubt, then they don't need to be walking around to the backside of the property unannounced...better to let a "possible" burglar get away, than get in this situation. In this case, if you look at the video, you can plainly see the address stenciled on the curb at the end of the driveway...right where they approached. They just screwed up and went to the wrong house, and killed an innocent man because of their mistakes.

That's the "old way," as incident after incident continues to demonstrate. Now we have SWAT raids on innocent people because someone at another address was SUSPECTED of selling marijuana and the police got the wrong address. Lethal force is used so people won't consume a drug that is probably less destructive than alcohol. You see the NYPD expending over 40 rounds on a guy armed with a wallet and the LAPD emptying their guns in a vehicle without even knowing who is in it. The police now launch SWAT raids on people for selling raw milk and not paying their student loans. The police go to the wrong address and shoot dogs first and ask questions later. "Officer safety" now seems to have priority over every other consideration. Remember how the police sat out side Columbine HS while two teenage boys continued their killing spree? How often do you hear the mantra "a LEO just wants to come home to his family at the end of the day?" Have you ever heard it said about an innocent victim of a police shooting that "he just wanted to come home to his family at the end of the day?" I've heard from a number of recent combat vets that the military has more restrictive ROEs in WAR ZONES than LEO's in the US. But apparently, the military is concerned with not alienating the locals, something which our government here at home doesn't care about so much.

Read the comments following articles like this one: they are overwhelmingly critical of police behavior and express the belief that the police are above the law. Incidents like this, which as you point out, seem to show that LE too often lacks any sense of proportion. So we have a LEO saying that he's never responded to a legitimate residential alarm and at the same time using the alarm call as the justification for shooting an old man in his garage. The police just didn't act like this 30 years ago. You can even see it in the movies. For instance, compare "Dog Day Afternoon" made in 1975 to "Inside Man," made in 2006. Both movies depict the NYPD response to a bank robbery involving hostages. Among other things, In one, the police treat the hostages with concern and respect, and in the other they treat the hostages as criminals. Guess which is which? "Mistakes" like this are all too common and the end result will be increased distrust of the police which will breed reciprocal mistrust of citizens (what we used to be called, now we're "civilians"), and that in turn will lead to more incidents like this one.