So..."armed shoplifters"; 2-year old with her hands up; etc. Let's break it down just a bit:
- Any idiot, and yes there are a lot of them out there, that takes a child with them when they commit a crime deserves the old biblical millstone about the neck experience, IMO. I can see shoplifting to feed your kids, but that's about it. Cruelty to Children charges should be, and likely are pending. DA has to play hard ball on this one.
- Report of "Armed Suspects" automatically means high-risk stop tactics, or should. Guns out (at the ready), and the occupants are called out and detained one at a time. Personally, I think the responding officers are too close. Protocol is 3 to 5 car lengths back on a HR stop. Rarely works that way, and clearly didn't here.
- Not many agencies are trained on what to do if there's a small child discovered to be in the vehicle. Ours isn't. So what do you do? Have one of the suspects walk back to you with the child in their arms? No idea, but deserves some thought.
- Before you ask, we do have a policy for pursuits when a child is known or thought to be in the suspect vehicle. Terminate immediately. Turn around and go the other way. Only exception is if the child is a victim of a felony. There, got no choice.
- And one of those officers should have taken the initiative to walk up and grab that child the minute she popped out. Hard to break out of the "mold" they're trained to follow, but that toddler was right on the edge of traffic. Gotta roll the dice there and go get that baby. I put a note in my "mental Rolodex" to talk about this with our T.O. Some day that might be us on the 6 o'clock news. Let's get it right.
So...could they have done it better, or differently? Maybe. But from what I read / saw...and maybe I missed something...it ended as it should have. Not that the end always justifies the means, but I don't know if I could have or would have done any better under those circumstances.
Rest assured, though, I'm thinking about it now.
We actually had a similar situation the other night. One of our directed patrol units attempted to stop a car that was known to have drugs and also matched the description of a vehicle in a shooting a few weeks prior. Lights em up, car slow rolls the stop then takes off.
We have a very strict pursuit policy, basically we only pursue if body parts are flying out of the car, they're shooting at us or the public, or, to a certain extent, if they're possibly drunk...
Anyway, vehicle stays in view, he remains stationary, but calls out location, direction of travel then calls out that they're wrecked out on a utility pole and there are 2-3 subjects running. I make contact with one of the runners in the backyard of one of the houses down the street, get him at gun point...
He has an 18 month in his hands. Holster up. I have my rookie pat him down for weapons, he's clean....but then he proceeds to yell and scream and lecture us about why we're chasing him... not gonna lie, I lost my sh** on him. Just couldn't handle that crap from someone who ran with a child in their hands.
Here's the thing...we couldn't determine who was driving. Vehicle was CLEAN. We detained everyone but didn't have any charges at that point.
...until 3 hours later when the vehicle was reported stolen.
So now we're going through the DA and indicting everyone in the car.
There was an incident on Live PD a few months ago where they had to fight a guy who had his child in his hands. LEO was able to get the child away safe but, that's all I kept thinking about while we were out with this POS. I'd have been happy to go hand-to-hand with this dude but not with a child in his arms. It's a situation that was completely new to everyone there, that included veteran officers with 15+ years experience.
I don't know if we have a policy on it but, I'm going to check...hope I never have to deal with that again.
