Wednesday, July 10, 2013

UPDATE: California Cops Who Shot Dog Pulled From Street Duty

Should be fired…and then prosecuted.

 

B

UPDATE: California Cops Who Shot Dog Pulled From Street Duty

July 8, 2013 by Ben Bullard 

Three Hawthorne, Calif. police officers have been taken off patrol duty after the department received a deluge of threats from outraged Americans who watched a video of at least one officer shoot and kill a Rottweiler belonging to a man whom they were arresting – for videotaping them – last week.

Another spectator’s video of the shooting went viral, amassing nearly 900,000 views on Youtube (so far), and the officers involved in the shooting began receiving death threats and angry emails, phone calls and Facebook postings.

Department spokesperson Lt. Scott Swain said the decision to take the cops off the street wasn’t meant as a disciplinary measure – rather, he said, it’s for the officers’ own safety.

“There’s been death threats,” Swain told Daily Breeze. “You’d like to believe that maybe some of the people are just venting, but then you’ve got to be realistic – there are crazy people out there.”

The department’s website was even hit with a DDoS (distributed denial of service) attack credited to Anonymous, the computer hacking activist collective, which had threatened exactly such an action after calling the cops’ behavior “unacceptable.”

Read more about the shooting, and watch the (upsetting) video in its entirety, here.

Ben Bullard Reconciling the concept of individual sovereignty with conscientious participation in the modern American political process is a continuing preoccupation for staff writer Ben Bullard. A former community newspaper writer, Bullard has closely observed the manner in which well-meaning small-town politicians and policy makers often accept, unthinkingly, their increasingly marginal role in shaping the quality of their own lives, as well as those of the people whom they serve. He argues that American public policy is plagued by inscrutable and corrupt motives on a national scale, a fundamental problem which individuals, families and communities must strive to solve. This, he argues, can be achieved only as Americans rediscover the principal role each citizen plays in enriching the welfare of our Republic.

 

 

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