This is really getting on my last good nerve. There’s this Officer, I’ll call him Officer Coffey. Anyhow, Officer Coffey responds to a radio call and to make a long story short ends up, just in the nick of time (as they say), killing this person before this person has a chance to cut another person up with a cleaver. Pretty heroic stuff really.
This is a textbook shooting, it wouldn’t make a good practical problem because it’s too obvious. Shooting Injury Team says it’s cool, Internal Affairs says it’s cool, Homicide says it’s cool, Grand Jury says it’s cool. Cool.
Well, actually it’s not so cool. The problem is we have this new “Police Monitor” That just can’t understand what happened. She has access to the reports, the video reenactment, the statements, everything that all the other professional investigators and jurists have seen, but she still can’t figure it out and has to call Officer Coffey to have him return to the scene and show her where he was standing. Bah!
So it turns out that this is Police Monitor Iris Jones’ first investigation and she’s playing it up for all it’s worth. It turns out that the person Officer Coffey killed was a “person of color” (if I were one to notice color I might point out that the person Officer Coffey saved was a “person of color”), and mentally ill (I will point out that stabbing people while the police are at your house is not a mark of sanity). Iris has taken this as an excellent opportunity to divide the community and cause Officer Coffey added emotional grief. I guess it only serves him right for doing his job.
But the worst part is the administration seems to be going along with it. I’d give you a link to the newspaper story but the url has the word “today” in it so I doubt it’s stable. Anyway the story is that that Iris and her panel won’t say what concerns they have, but The Chief refuses to stick his neck out and just deny this re-review.
Killing someone is no small matter for a person who’s spent his whole life defending people. F.A.T.S. scenarios end before the bleeding starts, before the family starts screaming, before people you consider to be on your side start the tape-recorded interviews, before you hear your name on the news every night. Officer Coffey has been living with this for four months now, it’s time for someone to call it. Tell Officer Coffey it’s over, you did a good job. Thank you.