flintknapper wrote:srothstein wrote:flintknapper wrote:There simply does not exist enough evidence (or witnesses) in this event to point one way or the other. It is very much He said, She said. The officer will not offer any more testimony in this case, that is certain....so we are never going to be able to scrutinize it further.
Well, I would think that if you are correct about it being a he said/she said type case (I don't agree but will so stipulate for the time being), then the police did the exactly correct thing by closing the case.
After all, we operate on the principle of innocent until proven guilty. If there is not enough evidence to prove the officer did something wrong, he was innocent. Right?
Absolutely right! Now....I hope you will not take exception to what I am about to ask next.
Absolutely no offense. How can i be offended by a friendly discussion?
How hard was that evidence looked for? The officer was interviewed by another policeman. I am trying to find out now if the University and the City looked into as they said they would.
That may be a good question. I don't know how hard they looked. This is why I said "if" it is a he said she said situation. If there is evidence, it should be collected and the case examined properly. But I took your argument as we should be saying the cop was wrong when you said it was an unprovable case. That is my sole point.
Without the evidence, we are all responding based on opinions and emotions. My initial emotion was the cop did exactly what I would have done. This is why I posted once and then stayed out of it until my response to you. If it is unprovable, the cop is innocent and we should stop arguing and move on to things we need to discuss.
But really, you are not asking me to believe that fraternal support and the thin blue line do not exist, right?
No, unfortunately there is a brotherhood out there and it does sometimes interfere in cases. I do not know if it did or not in this case. I would love to see this brotherhood act more professionally in all cases, but I do not know how to make that happen.
My problem with this whole thing is that the seriousness of it all doesn't seem to register with some folks. A firearm was discharged in a populated, public place. Deadly force was used. This is serious. A large amount of discount has been applied by some folks here because the target was a dog. I don't even care about that, I care that the matter is looked into... and looked into hard , to make certain it was proper and necessary.
I have to admit that I do not take it as seriously as some people have. One of the reasons is that it was a dog. I, as many cops do, tend to get very pragmatic about things and place much higher value on what really did happen than what could have. I will support that this probably could be looked into further, and should have been when it happened.
I do not know what evidence there might have been to collect that was missed. I don't know how to prove the dog was aggressive or not. The kids and the officer seemed to think it was. The owner seemed to think it was not. There were no other witnesses that have been reported in the papers yet to say which way it was. I will point out that in many areas of Texas law, the victim gets to define the crime. This is especially true of assault (if you think it hurt it is class A, if you say there was no pain, it is class C) and of threats. There is a little bit about reasonable in there in defining the threat, but that is not a very clear guideline either. Given all of this, the only thing left to investigate is if the officer was obeying the department's procedures. From what has been reported, he was.
