The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Nobody’s Going to Shoot You,’ He Said, Five Minutes Before She Got Shot

Posted on | March 15, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘Nobody’s Going to Shoot You,’ He Said, Five Minutes Before She Got Shot

“De-escalation” is the buzzword in law enforcement these days. Police are trained to reduce the risk of violence in confrontations by talking in a reassuring manner to the subjects of their investigations. There is also a lot of emphasis on “less lethal” weapons like tasers and beanbag guns as ways to avoid shooting suspects. In all of this, Nashville Officer Ben Williams was doing a great job with Melissa Wooden.

It was all fine, up until she got shot. Here, watch the bodycam video and see for yourself what went wrong with this situation:

 

When Officer Williams arrives on the scene, his first challenge is to get Wooden — who is mentally ill and suicidal — to move away from the other officer’s vehicle. He succeeds in this task, advancing step by step in such a way that she retreats from the road. Everything is going splendidly up until about the 3:50 mark on the video, when Wooden’s grandmother comes rolling down the driveway on her electric scooter.

“I ain’t scared of her,” says grandma. “Melissa, put that stuff down!”

Everything begins going downhill from there. Officer Williams now has to worry about protecting grandma from this lunatic who has armed herself with a baseball bat and a pickaxe and is obviously ready to die.

Well, “less lethal,” right? So he tries the taser, which doesn’t work.

If you’ve watched as many of these police videos as I have, this is predictable. Tasers are not a reliable weapon. The cop would have done better to charge her with a nightstick — c’mon, a woman versus a muscular cop? No doubt who would win that confrontation, but video of a cop whacking a crazy woman with a nightstick wouldn’t do much for “community relations,” see? So he used the taser, which only enraged the crazy woman. She then charged at Officer Williams, which prompted Officer Brandon Lopez to shoot her. Totally justified, I might add.

Nobody rioted in Nashville. CNN didn’t go 24/7 on the story. There were no #Justice4Melissa hashtags or “Crazy Lives Matter” marches.

Cops can shoot white people every day and nobody cares.

Melissa Wooden was in critical but stable condition as of Saturday, so she failed at her suicide-by-cop gambit — just barely — and I will leave it to readers to decide for themselves the lessons of this encounter, beyond the most obvious lesson: Crazy People Are Dangerous.




 

Category: Crime, Tennessee

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