The Los Angeles Times leads with an article of a tragic incident at a North Hollywood Burlington Store at which several Los Angeles Police officers, fired at a suspect causing injuries from which he later died in hospital, but stray bullets killed a 14 year old girl and injured another person. Apparently a bullet went through a wall into a changing room where the 14 year old was trying on dresses. The article reads:
[[ In an incident the police chief called “devastating and tragic,” an LAPD officer fatally shot a teenage girl at a Burlington clothing store during a chaotic confrontation that also left a suspect dead and another person injured.
The teenager was at the store in North Hollywood trying on dresses for a quinceañera, an LAPD source confirmed.
Preliminary information released by the Los Angeles Police Department indicated that police rounds penetrated a wall, killing the 14-year-old girl in a dressing room. Authorities said that they found a metal cable next to the suspect whom police officers were confronting but that no gun was recovered.
The violence late Thursday morning, just two days before Christmas at a bustling shopping district, left many people stunned and sparked questions about what prompted police to open fire. The state attorney general immediately launched a probe of the shooting.
“It’s just absolutely heart-breaking, and I cannot find words to try to comfort a mother and a family, but I will ensure them and the public and our people that we will conduct a complete and thorough investigation,” LAPD Chief Michel Moore, who was out of town with family but briefed on the incident, said in an interview with The Times on Thursday evening.
Officers responded about 11:45 a.m. to reports of an assault with a deadly weapon at the store near Victory and Laurel Canyon boulevards, according to the Police Department.
At the store, authorities encountered a man they said was assaulting someone, and they opened fire, according to preliminary findings by the Police Department. It was not immediately clear what prompted officers to shoot.
The man was taken into custody and died at the scene, said Officer Drake Madison, a spokesperson for the department.
During a search for additional suspects or victims, an officer found the slain girl, LAPD officials said in a Twitter post.
“One of the officer’s rounds penetrated a wall that was behind the suspect, beyond that wall was a dressing room. Officers search the dressing room and found a 14 year old female victim who was struck by gunfire,” the tweet from the LAPD’s media relations office read.
Another woman was injured and taken to a trauma centre, said Nicholas Prange, a spokesperson with the Fire Department. Her condition wasn’t immediately known.
Moore said police were still pulling video of the encounter, including from multiple closed-circuit cameras in the store, but that it appeared the girl was in a dressing room with her mother when she was struck.
“We have a young girl who was in a dressing room behind a wall that my understanding was in the path of where the officer fired,” Moore said. “This is a devastating and tragic circumstance, and it occurred during the actions of one of our officers.” Police have not identified the suspect or the victims.
The Times could not reach witnesses inside the Burlington when the shooting occurred. P William Briggs, president of the civilian Police Commission, which reviews all police shootings and decides whether the involved officers were justified in opening fire or should face administrative sanction or punishment, also called the shooting tragic and promised it would be thoroughly investigated….
(Chief) Moore said it did not appear that the officer who fired “would have known that there was anyone behind there or that he was looking at anyone other than the suspect and a wall,” but he said every aspect of what occurred and why would be analysed by LAPD investigators.
“There’s not a police officer in America who would ever want this type of circumstance to occur,” Moore stressed. ]]
In my view Chief Moore can stress away. His comments are hollow in the light of the recent history of deaths as a result of police action. To claim that an officer would not have known anyone was behind a wall in a store demonstrates a complete lack of foreseeability and ignorance. He could not have known there were customers in the store? What kind of excuse is that? Guns and tragic avoidable mistakes are clearly rife throughout the United States. The gun culture is symptomatic of a society that has lost any connection with rational thought and civilised behaviour.
We have seen and heard recently a number of people in courtrooms giving accounts of their behaviour, in floods of tears. Whether it is by way of excuse, by way of redemption, or genuine remorse and plea for forgiveness, one cannot be sure. The apparent willingness of some juries to find such actions as excusable and void of responsibility is staggering in its acquiescence to the culture of violence.
Until such time as the second amendment is repealed or replaced, the country, which is ever increasingly becoming a confrontational society, open to violence at the drop of a hat, will continue to have mounting tragedies of this nature.
There is a man blaring out lies across the nation, supported by elected representatives in both houses of congress, who vilify one another with shameless abandon supporting the carrying of weapons of destruction openly. They do this with a swaggering arrogance all the while claiming to uphold the constitution. They have amassed millions of followers promoting fear and surreal conspiracy theories without any foundation whatsoever and a colossal disregard for the truth. All this is reenforced by a media circus empire giving voice to people whose hypocrisy and mendacity is blatant and unapologetic in its affront to decency and civilised society.
The fact that there is an electorate of some size willing to support these terrifying people is cause for major concern throughout the world. Reality and truth actually do matter, but the reverence for ignorance and deception is the new American religion.
What has been going on in the United States is there for all to see and hear in the videos and media outlets across the world. The country on which it has the least impact is the United States itself. The populace does not seem to see or hear what is going on around it and lives in some sort of fantasy alternative universe, where marvel comics are the reality. The tragedy is that the decent citizens are letting the corrupt miscreants tear them apart. Whilst the super heroes are glued to the silver screen, the super villains are free to roam the planet.
Forty eight years ago Presidential Counsel John Dean said: “I think there’s no doubt about the seriousness of the problem we’ve got. We have a cancer within… that’s growing. It’s growing daily. It’s compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.”
Whilst John Dean was clearly referring to the particular problem of Nixon’s White house of 1972/3, it is most certainly applicable to the entire country today. Those fatal words of the second amendment to the constitution of the United States, which were applicable solely to the neonate United States of 1776 which required a “well-regulated militia”, have been a growing tumour which has mushroomed into personal possession of massive fire power in a country that spends over $730 Billion per annum on a professional, more than regulated, militia, without the need of calling upon individual citizens to supply their own,
The supreme court’s refusal time and again to realistically and properly interpret the historical meaning in the wording of that amendment, and to allow for the blanket and wholesale arming of every single citizen is beyond comprehension. It is based solely on the attitude and mindset of the American Citizen’s propensity for violence and supposedly self-protection.
Until that mindset is obliterated there will be more people tragically shot for looking the wrong way, being the wrong colour, or just trying on a dress.
No comments:
Post a Comment