Dallas police Officer Cardan Spencer, who shot a mentally ill man then filed a false police report regarding the circumstances has been fired and now faces could face aggravated assault charges, the Dallas News reported today. (Or not; see the update below.) The department also raised questions about why Spencer's partner backed up his erroneous report:
is would be the first time since 1973 a Dallas police officer has faced criminal charges related to an on-duty shooting.
See related Grits coverage. UPDATE: Remarkably, a district judge refused to sign the arrest warrant, the DMN said in an update to the above-linked story, so the DA will now take the case to a grand jury. That doesn't happen often. If police had video of you or I doing the same thing, do you think any judge in Texas would have hesitated to sign the warrant? Press reports so far have not named the judge who turned down the warrant application. That information needs to be made public.
The two officers said Spencer shot Bennett outside his home after he stepped toward them and threatened them with a knife. But a neighborhood surveillance video cast doubt on that sequence of events, and an initial charge against Bennett was dropped.Hard to interpret these events any other way than Spencer covering his own ass through a false report and Watson similarly covering for Spencer. If there had been no home surveillance video, who thinks anyone would have believed witnesses contradicting the officers' accounts? According to the Dallas Observer, this
“There were no two steps,” Brown said, noting that investigators also reviews dash-cam footage of the shooting. “There was no raising of the knife.”
[Officer Christopher] Watson claimed “acute stress” may have colored his statement after his partner shot Bennett, but the chief cast doubt on that explanation and called for a supplemental internal affairs investigation into the officer’s actions.
“We were really taken aback that the first statement written by Officer Watson was not what happened,” [Dallas Police Chief David] Brown said.
See related Grits coverage. UPDATE: Remarkably, a district judge refused to sign the arrest warrant, the DMN said in an update to the above-linked story, so the DA will now take the case to a grand jury. That doesn't happen often. If police had video of you or I doing the same thing, do you think any judge in Texas would have hesitated to sign the warrant? Press reports so far have not named the judge who turned down the warrant application. That information needs to be made public.
The two officers said Spencer shot Bennett outside his home after he stepped toward them and threatened them with a knife. But a neighborhood surveillance video cast doubt on that sequence of events, and an initial charge against Bennett was dropped.Hard to interpret these events any other way than Spencer covering his own ass through a false report and Watson similarly covering for Spencer. If there had been no home surveillance video, who thinks anyone would have believed witnesses contradicting the officers' accounts? According to the Dallas Observer, this
“There were no two steps,” Brown said, noting that investigators also reviews dash-cam footage of the shooting. “There was no raising of the knife.”
[Officer Christopher] Watson claimed “acute stress” may have colored his statement after his partner shot Bennett, but the chief cast doubt on that explanation and called for a supplemental internal affairs investigation into the officer’s actions.
“We were really taken aback that the first statement written by Officer Watson was not what happened,” [Dallas Police Chief David] Brown said.
See related Grits coverage. UPDATE: Remarkably, a district judge refused to sign the arrest warrant, the DMN said in an update to the above-linked story, so the DA will now take the case to a grand jury. That doesn't happen often. If police had video of you or I doing the same thing, do you think any judge in Texas would have hesitated to sign the warrant? Press reports so far have not named the judge who turned down the warrant application. That information needs to be made public.
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