The Arizona policeman pulls over a woman with a van full of kids for driving 71 in a 55 – she is an out of state driver with an expired license. She starts playing rope-a-dope refusing to sign the ticket. When the officer gets tired of that game, she takes off (later claiming she thought she was free to drive off). When she decides to pull over again, the teenage son dramatically escalates the situation by hopping out of the van and coming around the front of the car and approaches the officer – he pulls his gun and points it at the son and tells him to get back in the car – which seems entirely appropriate to me. His body language suggests he is about to assault the officer, which he tries to do later.
She eventually gets out of the car “in the middle of nowhere” with cars driving by maybe every 30 seconds. When he tries to arrest her for driving off, the van empties including the son. Just at that moment, the two police cars coming to assist the officer arrive. She gets back in the car and drives off again. As she is fleeing, one of the officers (not the one who made the stop) fires 3 shots at the van, and claims in a minute or two later on the audio that he was trying to shoot out the tires. That officer has now been fired.
Keep in mind the context of what the officer knew, not what the video shows. He’s been called to assist an officer who has pulled over a van for a traffic stop and then pulled off. Just as he arrives, the van empties out and the son assaults the first police officer, then everyone hops back in. The town is about 2 or 3 miles ahead of the direction they are going – a high speed pursuit into a high traffic city is likely to end very poorly for the people in the van, and likely other innocent civilians – she ends up going around 100 mph and crosses over into the oncoming traffic lane to get around “slow” traffic.
Anyone have a picture or Elias Montoya? The video is very blurry. I want to see if he resembles George Zimmerman.
Beling a police officier is hard work and a dangerous and sometimes thankless job. If you haven’t read Blink yet, it is worth your time. It focuses on how the human brain makes split second decisions and has some great stories, including police interacting with the public in dangerous situations.
http://www.amazon.com/Blink-The-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316010669/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386448382&sr=8-1&keywords=blink
I’ve never been a police officer – my impression is police are trained never to shoot at the tires to disable a vehicle because that bullet is going to go somewhere if you miss, including possibly the gas tank. That being said, he was positioned in a way where he had a clear field of view and there was nothing in the direction of fire for the bullets to hit.
The DA refused to file charges on the officers – the mom was released on bail and the 14 year old son may still be in custody. Unlike some of the other videos, I don’t really have an issue with this one – but it is a bell weather of things to come. The first officer was using incredible restraint when dealing with the shield of racial immunity. I wonder how different this would have been if the driver was Mexican and had no driver’s license or insurance.
I think the officer pointed his taser at the son at 6:36. His gun his holstered on his right hip. Whatever he pointed was taken from the left. Looks like a taser to me.
That sounds right now that you say it – I think I read that elsewhere..
Errrr, that should say 6:26
A complete lack of respect for the police here, I think. There is a fine line between normal police work and a police state, but I was raised such that I would never drive off after being stopped and, if I had been the teenager, I would have been grounded until I was 30 for just getting out of the vehicle.
One account (not confirmed) was that she had prior arrests.
One detail that the “look the other way” media accepted as fact is the notion that she and the kids are on vacation and are tourists. This was October 28th, which is a Monday. There is no holiday other than Halloween that time of year. It’s 22 hours driving time from Tennessee to Arizona.
On a Monday afternoon in October, her kids should have been in school in Tennessee. Perhaps she “home schools” them and this was a field trip?
Given her TN driver’s license was expired, more likely is they were evicted from where they were living, and living out of the van, doing what they need to do to survive – selling drugs, shoplifting using the kids, maybe some sex for money thrown in… Mom is a playa.
Yeah, that’s home schooling in the Oliver Twist, Fagin fashion.