The sheriff's department has provided an audio recording of the moments leading up to the shooting and the immediate aftermath. It is truly an appalling record.
http://www.abqjournal.com/581200/news/girlfriend-begged-for-ambulance.html
Deputies surrounded the vehicle but didn’t try to enter it because they feared Grimm was still armed. In the recordings, the deputies can be heard giving Grimm verbal commands to exit the car.
The Sheriff’s Office called for K-9s and deputies with rifles to form a perimeter around the car. Deputies can be heard saying they saw Grimm moving inside the vehicle.
“Tidwell was going for the extract,” Grundhoffer explained to another deputy who arrived on scene. “I looked through the windshield on my side and he started pulling it up. That’s when I yelled ‘gun’ and engaged him.”
During the lengthy standoff, Grimm exited the passenger side of the truck and was moving on the ground. The Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that the deputies couldn’t see his hands until a K-9 was unleashed and moved Grimm into the open. Deputies started first aid until paramedics arrived.
Deputies surrounded the vehicle but didn’t try to enter it because they feared Grimm was still armed. In the recordings, the deputies can be heard giving Grimm verbal commands to exit the car.
The Sheriff’s Office called for K-9s and deputies with rifles to form a perimeter around the car. Deputies can be heard saying they saw Grimm moving inside the vehicle.
“Tidwell was going for the extract,” Grundhoffer explained to another deputy who arrived on scene. “I looked through the windshield on my side and he started pulling it up. That’s when I yelled ‘gun’ and engaged him.”
During the lengthy standoff, Grimm exited the passenger side of the truck and was moving on the ground. The Sheriff’s Office said in a news release that the deputies couldn’t see his hands until a K-9 was unleashed and moved Grimm into the open. Deputies started first aid until paramedics arrived.There you have it. A textbook example of terrified LEOs shooting and mortally wounding a man they fear has a gun refusing any sort of medical assistance after shooting him until they feel "safe."
It happens all the time, and it used to happen in Albuquerque routinely until the APD was told to cease fire and stand down. Stop killing.
Initially, this incident in the South Valley was reported as the first BCSO involved shooting/killing of the year, but that was not so. It was the third. By comparison, APD has shot and killed one person so far this year.
Ultimately, the killing of Billy Grimm will be added to the statistics of police killings and will largely be forgotten, as most of the deaths by police gunfire are forgotten. This one will probably not generate the kinds of protests and demonstrations that some of them do in part because there was a gun found in the truck in which Grimm was a passenger. We will probably never know whether he in fact had any contact with this gun or whether the cries of "Gun!" from Deputy Grundhoffer as he shot at Grimm 9 times, hitting him once, were accurate. The audio recording of the incident is terrible, but it is not particularly informative about the facts regarding Billy Grimm and any threat he may have offered to officers. I detected no threat at all from him or from his girlfriend Destiny Cardenas in the audio. Disobedience, yes. But disobedience is not, a priori, a threat. Something that APD has apparently learned, but BCSO has not.
Another BCSO story appeared in the Albuquerque Journal today. A lawsuit has been filed against the BCSO over the treatment of a detainee at the Metropolitan Detention Center (the county jail). The inmate claims to have been tasered by jail personnel 30 times in one day as he was being restrained for transport. The suggestion is that this sort of brutality -- and worse -- is commonplace at the jail, and it needs to stop.
http://www.abqjournal.com/581955/news/taser-allegedly-used-on-inmate-30-times-in-day.html
Stories have been coming out of this and many other jails, prisons and detention centers for years about the pervasive violence, torture, brutality and neglect that have long characterized the treatment of people who are held in these lock-ups. This story is particularly egregious because the officers involved in torturing the inmate -- whose name is Mark Martinez -- continued to tase and abuse him at the hospital where he was eventually taken for treatment of injuries he sustained that day, and when hospital personnel attempted to intervene, they were threatened by officers as well. It's insane.
As we see over and over and over again, obedience and instant compliance are demanded by law and corrections officers, and when they don't get it, they become violent to the point of using lethal force,
Even when they do get compliance, as in the case of Lateef Dickerson in Dover, DE a couple of years ago, violence by police is still routine.
Until recently, all the officer had to say was "I feared for my life and the safety of others" to win exoneration for almost any form of violence, including lethal violence, they choose to engage in. It doesn't matter a bit whether the officer's "fear" was justified by the facts. All that mattered was that the officer use those magical words, and s/he was home free.
Now, after seemingly endless protests and several uprisings against violent policing, that's starting, slowly, to change.
It's not enough change, and it's by no means fast enough -- numbers of people killed by police actually seem to be increasing rather than declining as I had hoped -- but the constant violence by police is no longer being treated as "normal." It will have to end, but not before many more people are dead and injured.
Albuquerque has done a great deal to reduce the level of police violence since last summer, but it's not enough. As we see, the message hasn't yet penetrated to the BCSO or the State Police, both of which continue their killing as if nothing (much) has changed.
I hope the activists who brought so much pressure to bear on the Albuquerque Police Department last year can gear up similar protest actions against BCSO and the New Mexico State Police this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment