Dallas officer kills man after mistaking his apartment for her own, police say | Hacker News Reader

Dallas officer kills man after mistaking his apartment for her own, police say

dallasnews.com

62 pointsmwnivek29 comments

I see little relevance of this to HN. That said, the opening line stands out:

> A Dallas officer fatally shot a 26-year-old man Thursday night

This is a departure from the way this is usually written up these days, which would be: "A 25-year-old Dallas man died as a result of an officer-involved shooting."

This manipulation of language infuriates me to no end. The officer was not just "involved" in a shooting -- the officer did the shooting! This choice of words is not an accident. Law Enforcement has somehow convinced the press to use language that removes the direct causality (and therefore, the responsibility / culpability) of the shooting.

Longer articles on this phenomenon:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/craig-martin/time-to-kill-the...

http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/2014/09/02/stop-saying-office...

https://news.vice.com/article/some-nypd-officer-involved-sho...

This is a problem, hoever the bigger problem i see is the shot to kill policy

The misleading language is designed to hide that problem.

Seems like justice would be a manslaughter conviction plus the loss of her job due to the felony and/or a determination that she doesn't have the judgement to wield a gun. Along with whatever recompense to the family that a civil judgement can extract from her.

what will happen, however is that the officer will get 3 months "paid leave" (vacation) while her buddies perform an "internal investigation" that will find she did nothing wrong. or maybe they'll find wrongdoing but she gets a slap on the wrist like a demotion.

edit: his -> her

From my reading of the article, the shooting was not related to her job. Therefore it should be investigated the same as any other homicide where someone breaks into a house and shoots the person that lives there.

Therefore it should be investigated the same as any other homicide where someone breaks into a house and shoots the person that lives there.

Homicide...a person was killed but the charge is based on the killer's intentions. Even killing a person that shot you is homicide, though a justifiable one. From the article looks like a tragic mistake was made, so manslaughter. (Edit: Unless we learn that the dead person and the killer had a history of fights, romance or whatever)

>Therefore it should be investigated the same as any other homicide

Yes, this is the correct approach. She just walked into some guys apartment and killed him.

Also this incident is a strong argument for locking your door all the time. If this fellow had his door locked she wouldn't have been able to enter and would have clued into the fact that it wasn't her place. (not blaming the fellow BTW, just stating something that in hindsight would have saved him)

Should be, but won't

I think, assuming this was a real mistake, that she’ll lose her job completely, but I agree there is very little chance of a conviction or even indictment. Having said that however, it may come to light that this was not a mistake, in which case nothing is off the table.

Back then we had conscription, and all the conscripts had to stand guard duty every so often. Every single person was glad to hand in the weapon and ammunition the next morning, because "when you stand guard you have one leg in prison". The level of discipling with US police is truly unimaginably low.

her buddies.

To be clear, the officer described in the article was female. Your response hints at some pretty strong conclusions without having the faintest idea of the situation. That's pretty disturbing!

I'm not saying there aren't systemic issues with the U.S. police system, but you're not helping by making brash assumptions.

Pronouns aside, that's business as usual here in the US. A cop screws up, the cop goes on paid leave, IA finds no misconduct, and the world keeps spinning. A situation that turns out different is out of the ordinary.

Once more facts come out we'll see, but this could be a Murder 2. IANAL, and obviously the manslaughter is easier, but walking into someone else's house and then shooting them because you were confused that you shouldn't be there seems like it could go either way. The cop didn't PLAN on murdering someone, but this wasn't really an accident/emotional distress thing either.

This might be a rare situation where being a cop could work against the person. She's supposed to know how/when to wield deadly force, and not lose her cool.

Suspect (black) enters house next door where he kills the owner thinking it's his own house. What happens to suspect? Is he/she taken seriously that it was in accident?

But maybe this was an accident, im sure the cop who did this screwed their life up, they might have some remorse too for killing an innocent neighboor. However, i see here 2 problems: (1) the justice for cops is different that the justice for the rest of the world (2) the police force is taught to use force and think later. Almost all these cases never end up with injured suspect, shot in the leg or something like that. It's allways shoot to kill. This is a HUGE problem

> Almost all these cases never end up with injured suspect, shot in the leg or something like that.

Having had many friends who are cops, they're not trained that way. You aim at the largest mass available, period. They're not trained to shoot legs or the gun out of someone's hands like the movies. The first motivation is protection via incapacitation.

I do think a set up like Adam Corrolla's shotgun recipe would work for cops off duty: First round is a blank, second rubber, third a salt pellet round, and lethal rounds after that. If you can't scare or stop them with multiple levels of non lethal shots, save your life.

This entire incident is just so sad in how pointless it was.

> Police officials say she had arrived at the complex after working a full shift and was still in full uniform when she entered the victim's apartment, thinking it was her home.

> "It was, like, police talk: 'Open up! Open up!'" 20-year-old Caitlin Simpson said.

Something doesn't add up here.

>Something doesn't add up here.

Sounds like she got pissed off when her key didn't work and the occupant got shot because he went to answer the door because that's what most people do when someone bangs on the door and then they see a cop through the peephole.

> Mitchell said that after the officer reported Jean was wounded, other police officers who responded administered first aid to him.

I guess it was them who were shouting.

Was anyone else unable to scroll through the article?

The entire page is wrapped in a div with position:fixed applied to it.

Also some funny TODO's in the page source:

  TODO: Add real logo for DMN
  TODO: Add articleBody if analytics guy says do it

With NoScript in Firefox blocking all the javascript from running the article appeared, there was a browser scroll bar, and my scroll wheel caused the whole article to scroll with no problems.

I cannot read your todos on my mobile because you formatted them as code (which they are, but still unreadable on a mobile)

Headline should really be "Police officer breaks into man's home and murder him".

Unable to view this in Europe

Just, yikes.

Take this shit to Reddit pls.

Why the angry language?

Not to be overly picky, but I believe the majority of readers here do not come to HN for this type of submission.

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