Phoenix fires officer who pulled gun on parents over doll 4-year-old took from dollar store

[BumRushDaShow]

Source: Washington Post




The Phoenix police officer who pointed his weapon at a family and threatened to fire after their 4-year-old daughter took a baby doll from a Family Dollar Store has been fired. At a news conference Tuesday, Phoenix police chief Jeri Williams announced that she chose to terminate Officer Christopher Meyer, despite a disciplinary review board recommendation that he be suspended no more than six weeks without pay.

“In this case, a 240-hour suspension is just not sufficient to reverse the adverse effects of his actions on our department and our community,” Williams said, according to the Associated Press. A video of the incident went viral over the summer and brought intense scrutiny upon the police force in Phoenix, a city of 1.6 million that led the country in officer-involved shootings last year.

In late May, Dravon Ames and his fiancee, Iesha Harper, said they went on a family outing with their two children, London, 1, and Island, 4. Without the couple’s knowledge, Island took a doll from a Family Dollar Store, according to a notice of claim dated Wednesday that was filed by former Arizona attorney general Thomas Horne, who is representing Ames and Harper. A police patrol unit followed the couple’s car. Once the family members entered their babysitter’s apartment complex, an officer approached their vehicle with his weapon drawn and yanked open the front door, the claim said.

Despite department rules that require police to wear body cameras, the Phoenix officers were not wearing them, the claim said. But passersby recorded the encounter. The police released one video this week, but there are others online. “I’m going to put a cap in your a--,” one officer said to Ames as a second policeman, whose weapon was also drawn and pointed at Ames, walked up to the car, the video shows. “I’m going to shoot you in your f---ing face.” Both statements, Horne wrote in the claim, were made in front of the couple’s children, who were in the back of the vehicle.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/10/23/phoenix-fires-officer-who-pulled-gun-parents-over-doll-year-old-took-dollar-store/

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And more need to be fired.

[thesquanderer]

1. re:"not sufficient to reverse the adverse effects of his actions on our department and community"

The punishment needs to do a lot more than reverse the effects of his actions... they need to make sure that people like that are not on the street with guns!

One of the best lines of the last debate was Castro's "police violence is gun violence."

[Hortensis]

2. Good. I hope they're looking hard at his superiors.

[kimbutgar]

3. I was visiting Phoenix during that time and remember being outraged what they did to tho couple

And the children. Glad they did it though 5 months later.

[cadoman]

4. I can't fathom what these cops are thinking

They behave like they're in a war zone. How did they become so completely disengaged from the communities they work in?

Growing up in a mostly white, poor neighborhood, I knew plenty of kids that stole. But it's the kind of thing that's a phase and the owner would pull them aside and give them a scare and tell the parents, and they'd generally have the sense to handle it. It's about appropriate consequences and parenting.

What world do these cops think they live in, where some citizens are good and the rest they're just waiting for an opportunity to shoot??

[BumRushDaShow]

5. They train them to shoot black people

Police departments have been caught using mug shots of blacks to use for target practice. Oe such case made national news not long ago -

Florida police caught using mug shots of black men for target practice



01/16/15 10:19 AM—Updated 01/16/15 03:26 PM
By Willard Shepard and Mc Nelly Torres

A South Florida family is outraged at North Miami Beach Police after mug shots of African American men were used as targets at a shooting range for police training.

It was an ordinary Saturday morning last month when Sgt. Valerie Deant arrived at the shooting range in Medley, or so she thought. Deant, who plays clarinet with the Florida Army National Guard’s 13th Army Band, and her fellow soldiers were at the shooting range for their annual weapons qualifications training.

What the soldiers discovered when they entered the range made them angry: mug shots of African American men apparently used as targets by North Miami Beach Police snipers, who had used the range before the Guardsmen. Even more startling for Deant, one of the images was her brother. It was Woody Deant’s mug shot that taken 15 years ago, after he was arrested in connection to a drag race in 2000 that left two people dead.

His mug shot was among the pictures of five minorities used as targets by North Miami Beach police, all of them riddled by bullets. “I was like ‘why is my brother being used for target practice?’” Deant asked. Deant’s fellow guardsmen were angry too, but they tried to console Deant, who was devastated. “There were like gunshots there,” Deant said. “And I cried a couple of times.”

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/family-outraged-after-finding-police-using-mug-shots-target-practice