Authorities in New Mexico will not seek charges against three police officers involved in a fatal shooting after arriving at the wrong house last year.
Officers in the town of Farmington fired dozens of shots and killed Robert Dotson, 52, because he appeared at the door of his home holding a gun.
At the time, the officers were responding to a domestic violence call from a house across the street.
The Dotson family filed a lawsuit against the department last year.
According to a complaint filed by the family in court, police arrived at the Dotson residence late on 5 April, 2023 and “parked down the street and did not have their lights on”.
When Mr Dotson opened his front door holding a weapon, police immediately opened fire, striking him 12 times. Another 19 shots were fired at his wife Kimberly, who was unharmed during the incident. Police later said she opened fire on officers with a pistol.
disarm the police. they do not need to be armed their entire shifts. if they approached this house without lethal weapons, how many people would be dead right now?
zero. the answer is zero.
do not let cowards have lethal armament
Police should have access to weapons, but they should be locked in the car and require remote unlock when they actually need them.
Or maybe leave them to trained professionals they can call for support.
That might work in cities with a reasonable response time.
Or maybe just fucking train them. 6 months is supposed to be enough? You need more than that to cut someone’s fucking hair.
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It’s well known in most countries that only hunters and cowards own guns, so are you saying we should disarm everyone bar the hunters?
i believe the police in their normal day to day operation do not need to be lethally armed.
they turn simple transactions into life threatening events with almost no benefit to the public.
this is a perfect example. if the police only had, say tasers and this guy comes walkin out with a gun. is he going to run? not possible. do you really think he would just start shooting a block full of police officers? no of course not.
but the cowardice is part of police training. shoot first, question later and be sure to empty the fucking clip.
I would love to see all the people asking to disarm police officers apply for the job once we do. But its so easy to make these claims from the safety of your house. Who cares about actual realistic solutions?
ha, the old ‘youll be sorry, you just wait!’ . yeah i heard this one a bit from several officers, but in my anecdotal experience most actually didnt care about their sidearm a that much. its a reality that most officers never use the gun in the line of duty, which adds to my point.
form the inside, its amazing that the exact type of officers you would expect, react to this thought experiment the worst. IE, the best cops dont care about carrying lethal weapons their entire shift. the shittiest cops i worked with freaked the fuck out if you even kind of mention taking away their ‘power’. all anecdotal from one small burg, but damn if it wasnt fucking accurate.
shitty cops seem to lust firearms
Do you think all countries arm all of their regular police officers with firearms?
UK police only carry a baton and pepper spray my dude. Last I checked, they weren’t hurting for recruitment.
UK has almost no privately owned guns. US has more guns than people and its gun laws are nuts.
UK leading by example then. But riddle me this, how often is a firearm needed for an officer doing their everyday duties? Traffic stops, patrols, responding to calls. How often is it explicitly needed to be actively carrying a loaded firearm to a inherently non violent situation before having assessed it? I honestly have no idea. Is the expectation in the US that you’ll just get straight up murdered for doing your job? Is that how you guys live?
That’s the gist of what they’re taught, yeah. It shouldn’t take much digging to find “training” videos that are essentially: cop walks up to man in parking lot, man pulls a knife and lunges at cop instantly. The moral? Everyone is ready to kill you.
How often do you need your seatbelt? Should you still wear it anyway? And there are situations when wearing a seatbelt can kill you where you would survive without it.
The idea is the same with cops. A properly trained cop carying a weapon all the time would be safer overall by being able to react to violent situations while not posing a threat in non-violent ones. The issue is how incredibly undertrained most US cops are.
And yes, if they are not sufficiently trained, they should not carry a gun period. Not in their car, not anywhere.
Historically speaking, police are both cowards and hunters
If the police are allowed to kill you simply for possessing a gun, you do not have a right to bare arms. They have violated your civil rights.
bare arms
Those aren’t the type of guns we’re talking about…
💪
Hah, I’ll leave it.
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Having a gun on your person while opening the door is not brandishing. Also, there are countless other examples of people getting shot by the police simply for possessing a weapon.
There is also zero reason to believe that this man was aware the people at his house were police.
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You should look up the definition of brandishing because you are incorrect.
Who the fuck “investigates” before opening their door? Basically nobody aside from looking out a peephole.
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Having a gun in your hand is not brandishing. You have to wave or aim it in a threatening manner for it to be brandishing.
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They took 19 shots at the wife and didn’t hit her? Not only are these people disgusting but they can’t even do this part of the job fucking right.
I can do you better. There was a high profile police, er, “shooting” in my town back in the early 2000’s that made front page in the papers because four cops fired 204 shots at some guys – for those keeping score at home, that’s four Barney Fifes with three complete magazines, two reloads each out of their issued Glock 17’s – and hit no one.
So they succeeded in doing nothing but putting holes in a bunch of people’s cars, a couple of rowhouses, lampposts, mailboxes, etc., and failed to even so much as wing any of the multiple alleged perps. I mean, they didn’t manage to nail any innocent bystanders or people sleeping in their beds or anything for once, either. Ludicrous levels of wanton and irresponsible property damage and potential injury or death dealt to anyone within a radius of who knows how many blocks, not a single care given, for no benefit whatsoever. You know, just business as usual.
To this day I wonder if there actually were any perps, or if some cops just decided they wanted to shoot up a poor inner city neighborhood for yuks and get away with it.
We have stormtroopers, but at least stormtroopers look cool or something?
There’s a fan theory that they were ordered to miss, at least to miss Luke and Leia.
She fired at them. Those were retreating shots.
I did not realize that I will be reading a post of a person who is upset that additional innocent person was not shot dead.
Weird takeaway but okay? Jesus ever living fuck this place is turning into reddit fast. I’m very clearly saying it’s pathetic that they are failures at even being killers as well. They can’t even be the pieces of shit they want to be right. Not that I’m disappointed that they didn’t manage to kill her.
And you know that. But you just desperately wanted a moral high ground. So I guess clap yourself on the back my man.
Hey, chill. All I wanted is to joke.
No you didn’t. That was clearly serious.
Now you are reading my brain.
No I’m reading your words and the clear intent behind them. But I can show that I’m reading your brain. As I said you still have the stench of Reddit on you and that’s your sudden change. It has nothing to do with what I’ve said it has to do with you seeing the downvotes and that triggered your ‘must change opinio instantly’ response.
And even before that I’m just fucking done with people like you. Instigators. You saw my comment, clearly knew what it was really about, but had to jump in and try to turn it into something else, turn me into the bad guy, just so you could be the bright shiny example of humanity.
When, instead, you’re nothing but a negative presence when you behave like this.
Damn now that’s how you do a callout
I am on kbin, and as of now I see zero downvotes for my and your posts. And yes, I found hilarious that you were upset about this situation. Sorry that you do not understand my humor. And don’t go ballistic, sometimes you just have to trust people when they tell you about their intentions.
19 shots fired at a person without hitting means 19 chances to hit something, or someone, else.
Bullets don’t just vanish when they miss the target.
These cops have such shit aim, and such shit investigative talent, that they fail at every single metric. They should be in prison, but failing that, they should not be cops.
I don’t think anyone’s upset she lived, but there have been a lot of cases where officer’s inability to aim have added a lot of casualties from hitting random people in their field of fire.
pizza delivery guys fuck this up far less and show a higher degree of care and professionalism, while not having guns and power to hide behind
It’s fucked up the pizza delivery people are more professional than cops but here we are. It’s sadly a more dangerous job than being a police officer, too. At least, on average.
I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night by angry police who showed up at the wrong house and it’s fucking terrifying, but it’s a really bad idea to ever answer your door with a gun in your hand. If you feel like you need a gun to open your door you shouldn’t be opening the door.
Not opening the door wouldn’t save you. There was a no-knock warrant where a man was woken up when the police had kicked in his door and shined a light in his face. He had a gun next to his bed (I can’t remember if he was even holding it). He had been awake something like less than 8 seconds before the cops shot him because they saw the gun.
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Sleeping next to a gun sounds like a bad idea too. Unless you’re being hunted by assassins or something along those lines. Not that it’s that guys fault, because reaching for a weapon when you are startled awake is a completely natural response, but just from a safety perspective that feels like a really terrible place to keep a gun.
Just depends on the setting.
Small kids at home? Yeah that’s dumb AF.
Living alone? Who cares where it is, but concealing/securing it would help prevent it from being stolen if your house is broken into.
Ah I think I saw the body cam footage on that one, quite sobering to see.
In my experience, cops don’t always identify themselves during the knock. They just slam on your door extremely aggressively, and may respond that they’re cops if you yell through the door. Nor is there reason to believe them even if they do identify themselves verbally.
I hate guns, and don’t own one. But I would not blame someone for bringing a gun with them after one of those knocks in the middle of the night. Who knows who it could be.
For sure, when they knocked on my door at 4am I was sound asleep and had no idea what was going on. I don’t think they ever identified themselves as police, they just kept pounding aggressively on the door. My first instinct was full fight mode, it was a very confusing and terrifying way to wake up. I can definitely see arming yourself in that situation until you figured out who the fuck is pounding on the door in the middle of the night. It’s the opening the door while armed part specifically that’s a bad idea, that’s inherently going to escalate any situation and you don’t know who is at your door or whether they are actually a threat so it’s not appropriate to be brandishing a gun. Either don’t open the door until you know who it is or keep the gun out of sight until you know it’s actually needed.
Immediately call 911 and don’t answer the door I guess. Get in an interior room and lay down on the floor in your underwear.
I won’t open the door anyway. The cops have no legitimate reason to be banging on my door, ever, so they can go pack sand. The only two possible reasons for doing so are a wrong address or deliberate fuckery on their part. So I’d rather let them come to me. Preferably to the 3rd story bedroom, the one up the rickety narrow stairs. (Yay for 1920’s redneck architecture. For once.)
Despite all the yelling and threats and bluster they’ll inevitably do, if they ain’t got a warrant you are not obligated to let them in or even acknowledge their presence. Fuck 'em.
Republicans told me it was Legal to have a Gun in your house and also that we need to Defund Schools to give money to Cops?
Cops in the States do cops in the states things. I’m so tired.
Yeah but, yeah but see, see though the thing is though, but see he was white this time. So. Y’know. Might make the news. Oh, wait it did.
Member that time they found all those unmarked graves of people reported missing behind the Jackson Mississippi police station? Member that? Got less coverage than the Star Wars Holiday Special.
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Because not long ago they didn’t.
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must have been that White privilege I keep hearing about
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