I have some questions about the Shaw shooting

[Travelman]

62. I'll try to be as thorough as I can

This is a lot of stuff to chew up and swallow, so I'll go point-by-point. I'm going to not respond in the order that you asked them because some of the answers to later questions are relative to earlier questions. Also, a lot of the questions you've asked have been asked elsewhere in other ways. So, I'll be "paraphrasing" some of you questions, though that's even a bit loose of a description. But, hopefully, this can help out.

I've been studying on this a good bit since yesterday morning. I'd like to think that I have a pretty good handle on all of this, at least as it stands right now.


So:

"Wasn't he off-duty?/Why was he in his uniform at a second job?"

I have to admit that this had me a little puzzled as well, because it would seem counter-intuitive that someone working a private job should go around basically presenting himself as an on-duty police officer. The other side of that coin is that this is done all the time around here, though not quite in the same way. Utility companies, construction crews, and the like hire off-duty police officers to do things like direct traffic in a public street. So it's not like this is without precedent.

But an article today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch really cleared this up. Short version: smaller townships in the city and county will often hire off-duty officers to provide extra patrol in that area via a private security company. Officers acting in this capacity are required to be in their full uniform just as if they were working at their regular police job.

ST. LOUIS • The fatal shooting of a teen in the city’s Shaw neighborhood on Wednesday night drew attention to an oddity of city policing:

Sometimes St. Louis police officers are on patrol in city neighborhoods for an employer other than the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department.

Just as the St. Louis Cardinals pay uniformed police for extra security, so do several city neighborhoods. The difference is these neighborhoods pay private companies for the services of public employees to patrol public places.

They pool their money through assessments or special taxes — and buy the security services from middlemen.

Certain neighborhoods that can afford it can get more St. Louis police.

Not only can police officers wear their police uniforms while they are working “secondary” — they are required to.

{emphasis mine}


So, that sort of clears that up. What was this guy doing? Well, he was basically being a cop just like he would at his regular job. He was empowered with all other police powers just as if he was on duty at his regular job, and presumably he would do regular patrols, write traffic tickets as warranted, work traffic accidents, respond to calls within that particular "mini-jurisdiction," etc.

Now, maybe that's right (in the sense that St. Louis should be doing that) or maybe it's wrong, but one way or the other, we at least have an understanding what was going on, the mindset of the officer, etc. We know that he was not just playing a glorified security guard at a liquor store or warehouse or whatever: he was thinking and acting like a cop because he was acting AS a cop.




That leads us to:

"Why was he chasing these guys in the first place? What did they do to attract his attention?"


Knowing that he was, effectively, a cop on patrol just like at his "day job," the narrative that the police chief gave makes a good bit more sense:

Dotson, who came to the shooting scene and gave an update to reporters after midnight, said the uniformed officer had been in a car when he saw three males near Shaw Boulevard and Klemm Street at about 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. One of the males started to run away but stopped. The officer did a U-turn and then all three ran, in the 4100 block of Shaw Boulevard. The officer drove through streets following them, and then he got out and chased them on foot.

The officer followed one of the young men, identified as Myers, into a gangway. He was running and holding his waistband in a way that caused the officer to suspect he had a gun, according to police.

Any time any cop sees someone who makes eye contact with the police turn and burn, that will arouse suspicion, and rightly so. Someone who obviously bolts from the police almost certainly either is doing something or has done something that they don't want discovered. In this particular case, maybe the guy was farther away from home than he should have been on his GPS monitor (his attorney seems to think this isn't the case). Maybe he thought the cop had seen that he had a gun. Maybe he's just a nervous sort. Who knows? Regardless, there doesn't seem to be any dispute that he did indeed take off running when he saw the police coming. And that's a plenty valid reason for the police to give chase.



"So what happened next?"

Here's the police chief's description:

The officer drove through streets following them, and then he got out and chased them on foot.

The officer followed one of the young men, identified as Myers, into a gangway. He was running and holding his waistband in a way that caused the officer to suspect he had a gun, according to police.

Myers turned and approached the officer in "an aggressive manner," police said, and the officer told Myers to surrender. Myers continued to come at the officer and the two struggled. A sweatshirt the man was wearing came off during the struggle, police said.

Myers then ran from the officer, up an incline in the 4100 block of Shaw, and the officer saw what he believed to be a gun. He did not immediately fire because he wanted to be sure it was a firearm, police said. Myers turned and pointed a gun toward the officer and fired at least three shots, police said.

As Myers fired, the officer returned fire, police said. Myers continued to pull the trigger, but his gun apparently jammed.

A Lt. Col. (possibly the chief's lieutenant, but it doesn't say for sure) gave this description:

"As he exited the car, the gentlemen took off running. He was able to follow one of them before he lost him and then found him again as the guy jumped out of some bushes across the street," Lt. Col. Alfred Adkins said.

"The officer approached, they got into a struggle, they ended up into a gangway, at which time the young man pulled a weapon and shots were fired. The officer returned fire and unfortunately the young man was killed," Adkins added.

So that's where the "jumped out of the bushes" part came. It's not somehow mutually-exclusive with the chief's narrative.

Basically, when it turned into a foot-chase, the three guys split up. For whatever reason, the cop chose Myers to follow. At some point, Myers apparently hid in some bushes, and then when the cop was closing in, he took off running again.

Then he ran "onto a gangway." This part I'm not really getting. A gangway is an elevated platform for walking, in other words something like a catwalk. Here's the google image of the general vicinity of where this happened:


[IMG][/IMG]


I don't see anything there that looks like what I would describe as a "gangway." Furthermore, St. Louis is, for the most part, pretty flat, so I'm not really getting where this "incline" is supposed to be, other than perhaps the berm that elevates the interstate to the north.

So this is a case of some terminology that probably can't really be understood well unless one is actually there, physically at the scene, or at least knows the area pretty well.

So he left the store, ended up however far it was from the store to where he was first sighted by the officer, then being chased in a vehicle then on foot only to end up back at the store all in 10 minutes time?

I don't know anyone who said that he came back to the store. He left the store, which is at the corner of Shaw Boulevard and Klemm Street (left edge in the above picture) and was walking east on Shaw Boulevard when the chase began. All of this happened in the space of a city block, not some vast stretch of real estate.

How convenient is it that the gun found was one that was reported stolen?

That's pretty much completely expected. The VAST majority of "street guns" are stolen from somewhere. There's nothing particularly "convenient" or surprising about that fact at all.

But how do you mix up the type of gun?

As the Marine kindly noted above, the two models are potentially similar in appearance.

I would also point out that police tend to think less about makes and models and more about calibers. They think, first and foremost, about the "9mm" part, and then about the make and model later. When your life revolves around the potential of bullets flying at you, you think about what kind of bullet first, and what kind of gun later. And really, people are making a much bigger deal of this than it really is. Details get mixed up in early reporting. This is hardly the first time this has happened.

Some witnesses say Myers was tased.

Here, it's time for people to seriously slow their roll a minute and dial back the emotion to instead deal with actual facts. To date, there has not been a single actual, documented witness to this event. There have been lots of people who have CLAIMED to have been witnesses, there have been lots of people who have claimed others were witnesses, but there hasn't been a single actual, credible, documented witness at this point. The link you cited from boston.com, for example, makes a sidelong claim:

Both police accounts maintain that Myers opened fire. Witnesses vehemently disagree.

“He was unarmed,” Teyonna Myers, a relative of the victim told the St. Louis Dispatch. “He had a sandwich in his hand, and they thought it was a gun. It’s like Michael Brown all over again.”

The juxtaposition there strongly suggests that Ms. Myers was a witness. She was not. She was nowhere near where this happened when it happened. She arrived on the scene after the police chief. She's just making this claim about the sandwich out of thin air. She didn't actually see what happened at all.

Neither did anyone else.


Let this be crystal clear to everyone: as of this moment, at least as for what has been disclosed to the public, there were no witnesses to this event.


Therefore, any claims about "witness accounts" are just abject bunk. Someone may have witnessed Myers leaving the store, someone may have witnessed the guys running, but at least as of the facts available to date, no one actually witnessed the shooting.


As for the taser, that is pretty clearly another case of supposed "witnesses" who didn't actually see anything at all. The cop didn't have a taser, St. Louis doesn't issue tasers, and the security company has said that they don't use tasers, either. So the whole "taser" bit was just made up of whole cloth by one or more "witnesses" who are really rumor-mongerers.



"Why don't they use tasers?"

Tasers and other such "less lethal" weapons often cause more problems than they solve. Lots of departments around the country have either gotten rid of tasers or never started using them in the first place because they caused problems. The average, ordinary public thinks that tasers are somehow "safe." They aren't. They aren't a bullet to the heart, but they're a hair's breadth away from the electric chair. They can, and have in a lot of cases, killed people, in the name of being "less lethal." Somewhat ironically, the very people that tasers are most needed for, people whacked out of their brains on some drug, are the ones most likely to wind up dead from a taser strike.

The Chief has stated that they have the bullet and trajectory of the shots already studied. But they still don't have the gun powder tests from the victim. This is the easiest, fastest test available.

First of all, it's a pretty big leap to say that GSR testing is "the easiest, fastest test available," particularly when juxtaposed against bullet trajectories. It doesn't cost anything to determine bullet trajectories, and those tests are pretty much instant; it does take some time (granted, not a lot) to determine GSR, and those tests do indeed cost some money and, to be admissible in court, need to be performed under documented laboratory conditions.

The first rule of Forensics Club is that you can't rush forensics, at least not if you want them to stand up in court. Everything that is done is done in an exceptionally, often excruciatingly, methodical, carefully-documented way, so that the lab results are to be utterly unimpeachable on the stand. Anyone who watched the OJ trial, or even the Zimmerman trial, has had a painful lesson in how seriously lawyers can pick apart lab evidence like a vulture on a desert carcass.

The M.E. has only released the preliminary results of the medical examination. In other words, the coroner has given the body a cursory look, and determined the number of shots that struck the body and approximately where. The rest of the autopsy, at least as of this moment, either hasn't been completed or it hasn't been released.

Most autopsies for serious criminal cases take several days, not 24 hours.





Anyway, I hope this can help clear some of this up. I've been doing what I can to wrap my arms around this whole thing myself, and it's certainly not easy with all of the media noise going on.