Tallahassee Police initiate a felony stop on a pickup truck allegedly containing armed shoplifters. The suspects comply with police commands and are arrested without incident. A toddler in the truck, not to be left behind, decides to join the party. She exits the vehicle and walks to the officers with her hands in the air. Just like daddy did!
Of course the kid was caught on camera. The media is all up and arms. How dare the police make a toddler do a felony strut? Here is the link.
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/toddler-emerges-truck-her-hands-133444147.html
Hey you fucking idiots, I have a better question. One that didn’t occur to the media. Daddy, how dare you put your child in that situation?
It turns out there was a second child in the vehicle, even younger than the toddler. Let’s back up. Officers stopped the vehicle because the occupants were suspected of shoplifting. Shoplifters are sneak thieves, they rely on misdirection and concealment. Toddler and infant, can you say stroller and diaper bag? We don’t know because the MSM wasn’t smart enough to ask, but I would be willing to bet the kids were used as foils in the shoplifting.
They were detected by store security. Either there was a confrontation and a weapon was displayed or security spotted a weapon and decided not to confront the shoplifters. If a weapon was displayed, in order to maintain control of stolen property and effect an escape, then it is armed robbery.
Officers located the vehicle and conducted a “felony stop”. This is a highly choreographed affair. It is designed to give the police the maximum advantage. Officers use cover and concealment along with superior numbers to convince suspects to comply. Officers call the suspects out of the vehicle. They secure each suspect at a place of relative safety. They do not approach the vehicle until it is safe to do so.
Even when things don’t go according to the textbook, following the protocols set out for a felony stop allows the officers to respond rather than react. What is the difference you ask?
It is difficult to illustrate the difference between a reaction and a response, but I’ll try.
A reaction goes like this: Cop “Oh SH-bang, bang, bang-IT.
A response is: Cop, “No, dipshit your other left.”
We got a BOLO for a man with a gun. Before the broadcast was over we had four patrol cars surrounding the vehicle, from all points of the compass. No, that is not a classic felony stop, but it is what we had. We called out the driver and front seat passenger, did the felony stop routine and had them proned out on the pavement. We then turned our attention to the backseat passenger. Did I mention it was a two door Vega station wagon?
The guy in the back seat responded, “Fuck you, you gotta kill me.” He waved what turned out to be a WWII vintage Webley .455 revolver. All of the officers were hunkered down behind cover and weren’t particularly threatened. Things got a little tense when the driver picked himself up off the pavement and returned to the car. He flipped the seat forward and reached into the backseat. The driver then punched the recalcitrant passenger in the face three or four times and took the gun away from him. The driver exited the vehicle, threw the gun on the roof and slam dunked the passenger on the pavement. He then laid back down.
We took the guy in the back seat to jail and let the other guys go. The point is, we followed the spirit if not the substance of how to conduct a felony stop and it worked. Nobody got hurt.
One more story to bring this full circle. It was a Saturday morning and two idiots decided to menace other drivers waiting at a stop sign by pointing a gun at them. Had they looked right and in their rear view mirror they would have seen two patrol cars. But they didn’t.
Needless to say the harness bulls were on them like a duck on a June bug. The felony stop took place in the side parking lot of a store. A matron with two daughters about eight and ten had front row seats for the stop.
I arrived shortly after the suspects were in custody. I was the shift sergeant and she wanted to talk to me. My guys didn’t need me. The matron had a complaint about the way my guys had handled the stop.
According to her, the two patrol cars pulled in next to each other. The driver in the left hand patrol car yelled at the suspects to “put your fuckin hands on the dashboard.” The officer in the right patrol car racked an 870 and pointed it at the car. He sang the chorus threatening, “To blow their shit away.”
I don’t believe for one moment that she misquoted or embellished what the officers said. Either one was capable of saying, “pass the fucking salt,” in a social setting.
For her part, she wasn’t offended, but for the sake of her daughters the language was inappropriate. I agreed and apologized. I asked her if she knew why the officers made the stop. She didn’t know the details but did observe that the officers recovered a handgun from the vehicle.
I asked her if the officers were in control of the situation. She agreed that they were. I asked her what would have happened if they hadn’t controlled the situation. What if the bad guys hadn’t been cowed?
She got this far away look in her eye, for a moment and then said, “never mind.”
A little know fact is that the Texas Penal Code makes allowance for all sorts of politically incorrect language in lieu of shooting some asshole who clearly needs it.
The cops didn’t put that toddler in that pick up truck. They didn’t take her on a shoplifting adventure. What they did do was clean up the mess when things didn’t go as the crook planned. Sometimes cops act inappropriately. Most of the time they get it right. Cop work is kind of like sausage making. It ain’t pretty but everybody raves about the result.
I wallowed in the sewer for thirty years. I don’t begrudge a single day. I liked it there. I am not inviting the reader to join me. However, an acknowledgement that the sewer exists would not go amiss. There is such a thing as context. Without it effective judgment is incomplete. The Tallahassee cops did a good job. They don’t deserve the hatchet job they got from the local media.