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.
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.
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
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.)
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.