SuperJail Warden wrote:
The cop in the Daniel Shaver case wasn't great at giving directions. But Daniel Shaver was pointing his pellet gun out of the window of his hotel while drunk with a woman who was not his wife. He didn't deserve to be killed. Be he totally brought it on himself.
Old post, I know. Don't care.
That he was in his hotel room with two other people with whom he had been drinking and to whom he was not married is utterly irrelevant to any justification to use force. In what way do you consider it relevant? In what way is drinking with someone who is not your wife in a hotel room bringing your death by police upon yourself?
Also, the officer shouting conflicting instructions wasn't great at pretty much anything in this scenario. Everything he did was wrong. His most grievous error was setting himself and his partner up to arrest an allegedly armed person in a hallway corridor with no concealment or cover whatsoever. Making an apprehension while sitting in the dead center of a
fatal funnel. There was no report of actual shooting, so the worst they're responding to is a suspicious individual, or possibly brandishing a firearm. There was nothing to necessitate an immediate extraction of the suspect from his hotel room. Given this, the
best course of action would be to obtain access to hotel rooms on opposite sides of the hall and use the door jambs as cover to minimize exposure to incoming fire. Were the rooms occupied? Good question. If they weren't, there would be no reason to not use them for cover. If they were, there was every reason to gain access to evacuate the occupants and then use the rooms as cover, if this was the kind of response they believed was required. Not having cover likely increased the perceived danger by the officer who took the shots.
As you already admitted, he also was't great at giving directions. In fact, he was awful at giving directions. Out of any of the people involved in that situation, he should know best that simple and direct instructions are most likely to be understood. Doing the equivalent of playing Deathmatch Twister is not likely to have positive results. Screaming that you're going to kill him if he makes "another mistake" is not likely to garner positive results. All you're doing is stirring the pot and making things more volatile. And he wasn't even just freaking out Shaver, either. He was also freaking out his partner. The officer who shot wasn't the one screaming commands. The one screaming commands, though, was all too likely burying his rookie partner's "oh shit"-o-meter.
So no, he wasn't good at anything that night. He probably shouldn't even be a cop. And he probably knows it, too, which is why he retired from the police department and hot-footed it to the Philippines before he could be charged or sued, where he remains to this day.