Headline is kind of funny, but I wanted to know what he shot at
In body cam footage shared across social media, the officer was seen jumping to the ground and shouted “shots fired” after the acorn strikes the roof of his car. He then turned and emptied every bullet from his gun, each aimed squarely at his squad car.
Funny again…
While Hernandez fired on the car, Marquis Jackson, who was accused of stealing his girlfriend’s car, was in the back of the police cruiser. Officers had searched, handcuffed and loaded the accused into the back of the police car and, despite being cuffed, it was Jackson that the officer thought was shooting at him.
Nope, he was trying to kill someone handcuffed in the back of his squad car and had already been searched for weapons.
Cop should at least be facing reckless endangerment, if not attempted murder.
He also yelled “I’m hit” while unloading on his own vehicle.
Same as when they think they’re doing on fentanyl…
After hearing the sound of the acorn, the deputy reported that he also felt a “tingliness” all along the side of his body. He then said his “legs just give out” and he fell to the ground, assuming that he had been seriously injured by something.
Because of this, the video also showed Hernandez complaining about feeling “weird” and shouting to his colleague that he’s been hit. It’s all very dramatic.
Cops are constantly terrified because of their training, so they panic and mistake a panic attack for something else.
Being a cop sucks so much (because of their own leadership and culture) that good qualified people do t want to be a cop. So we end up with these fragile snowflakes that shouldn’t be allowed to carry at all. Let alone be a cop
These idiots are so convinced that merely touching fentanyl will make them collapse that it actually happens to them.
If fentanyl was that strong, people would buy one bag and it would last for like a year.
Imagine a drug you only had to touch. You’d never run out!
good people get fired as cops because they hesitate to shoot unarmed people and won’t lie for officers doing questionable things.
…fragile snowflakes that shouldn’t be allowed to carry at all.
Yeah but deputy tacticool has holo sights. Not wasted on him at all.
Poor Durango.
Training? What training?
My goodness what a fucking snowflake. Maybe you shouldn’t be in the profession if you’re “scared shitless” 99% of the time. But we all know that’s a cover for them. They love killing people.
“It hit my vest” and “I feel weird”. Them be signs that his fat ass has coronary artery disease. Fucking Okaloosa County. Good riddance. Don’t miss it.
Is he trying to use the South Park ‘He’s coming right for us’ defense?
Aren’t they all?
Even if he wasn’t trying to kill Marquis Jackson, he clearly didn’t care if he killed him.
I deal with PTSD vets every day so I understand the snap buuuuut… No one else gets to get away with a slap on the wrist because of their mental illness so fuckem
I mean. Being in combat and being a cop are two different things.
Maybe this guy was in a shootout and has PTSD, maybe this is the only time he’s ever fired on duty and he’s just a coward who panicked.
During the course of the investigation into the shooting, deputy Herandez resigned from the force.
Oh wow. Good for him. I’m honestly surprised.
And most of us would still wait for an actual target in a built up area.
See I’m like, I don’t even think you could qualify most of the things you would do to this guy as being punishment. Preventing this guy from being a cop forever (pretty unlikely, but could happen), isn’t really a punishment. If he’s discharging his firearm into his own car, he’s obviously just unfit to be an officer and that’s a pretty clear safety concern. If you sent him to prison, that might be more of a “punishment”, but that’s also, you know, what cops do basically their whole careers, is send people to prison, and we still have all the same problems with the prison system as we’ve always had, so, you know, I’m like. I dunno. That doesn’t seem like a clear “win”, to me, both in terms of improving society and in terms of helping him out if he’s mentally ill which, you know, seems to clearly be the case, here.
You could also maybe think, hey, this guy goes to an asylum or something for mental illness, but that kind of has the same problems as sending someone to prison, it’s not usually a helpful system.
Cop should at least be facing reckless endangerment, if not attempted murder.
The review board found his conduct was not reasonable; so, it’ll be up to the prosecutor (which I’m sure in FL is an office eager to go after cops). The other officer, who began shooting after the officer wearing the bodycam in the OP began shooting, was found to have acted reasonably.
Essentially, you can’t think an acorn is a bullet and get away with shooting at a detained and secured civilian. But, if another officer on scene thinks, even unreasonably so, that an acorn is a bullet and starts shooting at a detained and secured civilian, you can too. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, take that as reassurance that your critical thinking remains, at least partially, intact.
Essentially, you can’t think an acorn is a bullet and get away with shooting at a detained and secured civilian. But, if another officer on scene thinks, even unreasonably so, that an acorn is a bullet and starts shooting at a detained and secured civilian, you can too. If this doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, take that as reassurance that your critical thinking remains, at least partially, intact.
IIRC Sympathetic Fire seems to be insta-forgiveness (by other police and the courts) whenever it comes up.
As one example, I think it played a role in the Daniel Shaver case, but it’s been a long time since I read all those details and I really don’t want to dive into that pool of anger and sadness again to verify.
Keep in mind, this is Florida. It is perfectly legal to murder anybody if you can prove that you felt threatened.
If a random loud bang from an acorn falling nearby is enough to get someone to behave like this, they really should not be walking around with a gun. This is completely insane and unhinged behavior.
What was he shooting at? This man just blindly ptied his gun at something or someone he couldnt see!
He was shooting at the unarmed suspect cuffed and trapped in the back of the police car.
Read the story.
And yet the most surprising thing about the story is that the bodycam footage was released, smh
Likely to protect the cop/department too, since he shot at his own car that already had a disarmed, detained suspect inside. He very nearly killed someone that was already a non-threat. If the body cam footage got out it might make people think their cops are negligent or improperly trained! /ghasp
It’s like a business. If the liability rests with their officer and they are afraid of a lawsuit causing significant political blowback they are going to take action against the officer to minimize their liability. Hearing about an officer doing something like this and then leaving the force means there is nothing left for them to take action for.
If he didn’t resign, perhaps it would be slightly harder for the chief a town over to hire the guy, but since he resigned he may have minimal marks on his record.
I’d bet a thousand bucks this guy gets another job as a cop within 1yr though.
I’d bet a thousand bucks this guy gets another job as a cop within 1yr though.
I’d bet a thousand bucks I know which video they’re going to be watching in the morning briefing on his first day.
Of all the stupid that exists in Florida, they actually have pretty powerful open records laws.
It’s actually one of the reasons Florida has the “Florida Man” reputation. We know more about what’s happening there.
Obtaining a barber license means that you have completed a minimum of 1,250 hours of instruction in barbering education within a period of at least 9 months or completed 1,250 hours of training. It takes 1,250 to 2,000 hours to be a cosmologist. Police in Germany get 2.5 years of training, and in Finland, police education takes three years to complete. Police in the USA get 750 hours.
USA intentionally dumbs down its people.
Exactly. The PD will also reject applicants if they are too smart.
When I first heard about it, I could not believe it. Fair enough there is shortages of police so they want recruitment process to hasten. But this is at the expense of public safety as there are too many trigger-happy police. Which is counter to “protect and serve” motto!
Plus, it’s one of the few jobs that will disqualify you for being too smart.
Our brave boys in blue, ladies and gentlemen.
There are 22 jobs in the U.S. statistically more dangerous than being a cop.
Cowards. So many of them are cowards.
You missed the most dangerous job: US president.
1/10 of all presidents have been assassinated and 1/5 of presidents died in office
Presidents Georg, who lives in white house & dies every day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted
Might as well climb K2. 1/4 summit to death rate.
Are the numbers for warlord/dictator even worse?
Barbers have a more dangerous job. People are very particular about their hair, and can run out without paying.
Yep, and this is just tracking mortality. You would think, oh hey maybe they look better if you included things like workplace violence…nope. Pretty much 80% of work place violence happens to healthcare workers and social workers.
So pretty much every healthcare worker has experienced more violence in their work than police officers. I’ve had patients take swings at me in my hospital, it’s a fairly natural response to being in pain, on drugs, or disoriented. But just because your occupation has the potential to introduce you to a violent environment, that doesn’t justify your own participation in it.
Cops will taser or shoot you before you can take a swing at them. Healthcare workers and delivery drivers don’t get tasers and guns.
Looking forward to my next traffic stop so I can mention that crossing guards have a more dangerous job than cops 🫡
Virtually every main cause of death on this list is falling or getting struck by a vehicle.
Yes. A lot of them also involve being killed by the machines they use too. Safety measures can only go so far.
Crossing guards being on a list with derrick operators and power linemen is a disturbing commentary on our road infrastructure priorities.
I’m sorry, this is fucked up and I shouldn’t be laughing, but you really can’t make this shit up
What’s more, in his body cam footage you can clearly see the acorn fall into frame and strike the roof of his car. When asked if this was the sound he heard, Hernandez had this to tell investigators:
“I’m not gonna say no, because I mean that’s, but what I, [10 second pause in speaking] what I heard [3 second pause in speaking] sounded almost like [12 second pause in speaking] what I heard sounded what I think would be louder than an acorn hitting the roof of the car, but there’s obviously an acorn hitting the roof of the car.”
So has he been tested for drugs already?
Guy served two tours overseas.
I think it’s kinda fucked up to laugh at what clearly seems like a PTSD attack. He shouldn’t be a cop, and it’s a good thing he resigned, but you shouldn’t mock someone for this. Even if it’s super easy to.
“Man killed people for a living for years so we gave him a pistol and let him corral the civilians around!” Making fun of it and shaming this dumbass system is the only hope of it ever changing
And in order to shame the system, you shame the man?
Wise.
Yeah I know, taken out of context it’s really funny but it’s not when you consider the circumstances.
I hope he actually resigned and found a safer job instead of just being moved to another department and that the mental health checks for cops get better, but I’m not holding my breath for the second one.
Top comment really nails it:
This is unironically the most embarrassing video I have seen in my entire life. I am not exaggerating at all. I would kill myself if there were footage of me acting like this. Dude gets scared by an acorn, does a Max-Payne-backwards-dive, unloads 20 roads into his own car (luckily not murdering the unarmed guy in the back of it), does some horrid Arnold-Schwarzenegger impression while crawling over the floor bawling his eyes out, and then forces an armed stand-off with literally no one. Actually absolutely insane, the most unhinged behaviour I have ever had the pleasure to witness.
He quit afterward. Probably because he was teased mercilessly by other police officers. If only we could harness peer pressure to reduce police shootings.
Imagine doing this and just being able to quit your job, meanwhile a citizen would be arrested and charged with a felony.
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It’s entirely like something out of a comedy.
This sounds like a scene out of super troopers that would have been cut for being too unbelievable.
Too far fetched fiction.
“save me Tom Cruise, save me Oprah Winfrey!”
Wow. Listen to those screams of traumatized neighbors as he continues to claim he was hit ~1:35/1:40 in. Can’t tell if it’s the other cop yelling at screaming people to stay back, or a mother yelling at her screaming child to stay back or what.
And that guy in the car - they’re just going to shrug and say “my bad” about the fact that if the cop was even the slightest bit competent with that firearm he’d be dead?
That’s nuts
Thank you.
This story pairs nicely with the other one that’s currently trending.
Florida Legislator Files Bill That Would Keep Killer Cops From Being Named And Shamed
This dipshit is what they want to protect so he can just go work in another district and kill someone else.
Headlines like this are often a stretch, if not outright BS. Read the story. The headline does not begin to do justice as to how fucked up this was.
Unpopular opinion: Cop pay and training is inadequate. If you want professional cops, you need to hire professional people and train them professionally. The only people that apply to become officers are morons and the power hungry. People with integrity don’t apply because the money is shit.
Any job that trades money for fraternity is a job that’s garbage. And boy oh boy are cop houses frats.
they dont want professional cops.
They want hyper aggressive bullies that have no problem with getting down and dirty with the corruption.
Profesionals would be a threat to cops. Which is why they try so hard not to hire anyone that would actually be qualified for such work.
Cops in my area get paid about 70-100K USD yearly, but it’s a high cost of living area. Sergeants and above, though, make bank. We’re taking $120K and above. They’re just as shitty as cops in the sticks. It’s anecdotal, but I wonder if fixing income alone has little effect.
Low bar and high pay? Huh.
Yeahhh they need a higher bar. And then the pay to match that.
The other thing is that the bar should be for going over not under. They have standards for maximum intelligence and won’t hire people who are too smart.
That’s not strictly or universally true. Yes, there was a federal (SCOTUS?) case about that, I think for New Hampshire, and the rationale was that people that were too smart (>120 IQ) tended to get bored on the job and quit, which costs the city more in training. BUT I don’t think that all police departments use the same hiring practices.
I can’t speak for all police agencies, but over a decade ago I applied for Chicago PD, because I figured that it didn’t take much to be a better person and cop than Jason Van Dyke, or Anthony Abbate. The application test was pretty easy, except for recognizing faces (mostly because the pictures were photocopies that were 1" square). The problem was that they had a lot of things that moved you up on the selection process, like, did you have an immediate relative that was a cop, did you have prior military service, did you go to public schools in Chicago, etc… That meant that people with cop relatives ended up getting hiring preference over people that were smarter and better suited for the job.
In retrospect, I’m really glad I didn’t get high enough up in the lottery to get an offer; the more I learn about policing, the less I like police agencies in general, even if there are individual cops I can respect.
The median gross pay among Seattle PD’s more than 2,000 employees 2020 was about $153,000, not including benefits, with 374 employees grossing at least $200,000 and 77 making at least $250,000
Income and proper mental health management as well as proper holiday/forced holiday’s post stressful engagements.
That’s a fun myth not at all backed up by fact.
My job is orders of magnitude more dangerous and I make less than an officer with the same amount of experience.
For reference average around here is ≈40k while an officer with equivalent experience to me is 90-100k.
What sort of job?
A fun hint would be nearly any job involving vehicles is as dangerous as being an officer and those involving dealing with people as well make that job much more dangerous.
Landscaping is as dangerous.
I mean it’s partially a myth in terms of pay, but I wouldn’t really be opposed to officers having more training, especially for crisis intervention, and shit like that, training for when they actually have to interact with people face to face, rather than pseudo-military tacticool bullshit.
I’m with you there but I’d go so far as to say I’d rather they be trained enough to earn the money they are currently making. I’m my state a barber has more training and certification then a state certified officer.
There should be a 2 year criminal justice degree requirement. It requires more schooling to be a fucking barber than it does to be an armed police officer, and a massive number of them couldn’t quote basic laws, let alone explain them.
I would also posit there needs to be at least 6 months of situational simulations in proper threat engagement and another 4 months in situation de-escalation training. The fact I had more peace-officer training as a combat arms trade is ludicrous.
There’s vastly more to being an officer of the law than just hitting the target range and that shows with the number of issues presented every year.
Cop pay and training is inadequate
For what though? That’s the problem. They have to do a lot of different things, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
They have to deal with homeless people who are trespassing. They have to deal with people having mental issues. They have to deal with domestic disturbances. They have to deal with violent crime. They have to investigate thefts. It’s really a grab-bag of different jobs, and they’re not trained well in any of them.
Making it worse, the training they do receive focuses on violent crime. And, in particular, the training is how to survive the most violent possible criminal who is actively trying to kill them. That’s what the TV shows are all about, but it’s not what the job is about 99.99% of the time. Only 27% of officers say they have ever fired their guns in their entire careers. If they’re always thinking about this worst-case scenario, they’re not going to be doing very well at any of the other jobs.
And from what I’ve been lead to understand from people who discuss policing issues in the US, cops are made to feel terrified of those ‘worst case scenarios’. Fear is instilled deep, deep in their psyches and it is pervasive in every facet of their work.
Any human with a job should have a living wage and proper training imo. Cops are no different.
I don’t think that training (of which they have a lot, most of it to my knowledge teaches them that they are at war with citizens and always in danger) is the entire answer.
We need to figure out what we want cops to do.
To my knowledge:
- Cops have no duty to protect citizens
- Cops can steal our property (in traffic stops)
- Cops can murder us with minimal justification and expect minimal consequences. Indeed even lawsuits are paid by the city and not the police budget
- Cops are immune to prosecution in most cases.
So, why do we have them? They seem to be an armed gang that waits for us to commit a traffic infraction and then write us a ticket and possibly kill us or steal our property. They have no duty to protect us from criminals or disasters and if they get scared and kill us, at worse they transfer to a new department.
I think we need law enforcement and police, but the current system is irrecoverably broken imo. They have had decades to reform themselves and haven’t done so unless under duress from a court. We need to rethink why we have them and what their job is. Indeed if we want them to have a dangerous job where they protect us from “things” and put themselves in harms way they need to be compensated properly, but I don’t think we can fix the current system.
I got off on a tangent, my apologies.
Currently the police nationwide live up to the saying ‘police exist to protect home prices, not lives’
So, why do we have them?
I think it’s a pretty common narrative that police agencies came about as a result of slave catchers and strikebreakers, thought I’m not sure to what extent that’s true, and to what extent that’s been the case with, say, police in the UK, or other countries, who obviously still have police forces with different reputations than those in the US.
In any case, even if the narrative might not necessarily be accurate, it’s still somewhat reflective, to me, at least, of what police are supposed to do in the modern day. They have no duty to protect citizens, they steal our property, they can kill us, and they’re immune to the law. They are the law, is basically what it is. They are an armed gang, they’re an armed gang that the city pays in order to manage all other forms of violence which might happen in the city, even systemic violence which the city might create from, intentional or otherwise, resource mismanagement. They deal with the homeless, and mentally ill, and push them into a prison system where for-profit and public prisons can use them for free labor and generally lock them away into chaotic, meaningless, and authoritarian microcosms of society.
We also need homelessness to be rampant as a kind of threat, which we can levy against labor, since a population which can quit their jobs and go and still have a house obviously has more leverage against their employers, a higher capacity to unionize and strike. Homelessness also means housing is in more demand which helps drive up housing prices as long as you are trafficking the homeless away from the housing, when, otherwise, homelessness would generally decrease the value of the housing in a neighborhood since they would just kinda stick around, being, even formerly, embedded and tied to a community. Drugs need to be illegal as a form of protection on intellectual property laws, enforced at the behest of pharmaceutical companies, who want to monopolize particular sectors of the market, and sell to our extremely privatized hospitals at an absurdly high premium. The police serve these interests, and more. That’s their purpose. They just exist as an extension of society and serve it’s whims. They exist, basically, to maintain status quo, good, or, in this case, bad.
Cops in central IL were making 100k+ easy in 2010. Who knows what that is now. It is pretty good money compared to similar training and risk.
They literally reject candidates who are too intelligent.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/court-oks-barring-high-iqs-cops/story?id=95836
The money is only shit if you’re ethical. https://divestspd.substack.com/p/nearly-50-seattle-patrol-officers
I think it’s kind of a multi-tiered issue. What you say is true, but police are also kind of structured in the way they are in the US because we have so many issues that we basically use them as a band-aid for, so we spread them very thin and kind of go with a quantity over quality approach. Which hasn’t ended up working out very well, except in that, sometimes, and particularly for your white middle class neighbors that are going to call the cops for a noise complaint, cops appearing is basically the only thing that they needed to do. It’s just for security theater, just so you can have an interlocutor that can do all the work of dealing with someone else for you, at your behest. A cop is just kind of meant to be around in order to make your dwindling population of middle class white people feel safe, more than they’re supposed to actually make everyone safe. Such is why private institutions in a lot of places basically just have their own LARP cops in the form of security guards, who just stand around 95% of the time, and eat up way more in salary than they would save from product losses, or increased insurance premiums on product.
You pair this with the actual built environment in a lot of places, where cops have to be even more spread out than they otherwise would be, enforcing traffic tickets and shit like that, and it’s kind of an obvious formula for a shitshow. Even if you gave police departments just straight up more money, three times as much, you’d still probably see complaints that they’re underfunded, because they’d just spend all the money on hiring more people, and more equipment, rather than making a smaller number of people who are maybe better equipped to deal with, say, psychological problems that somebody might have. And obviously, in such a case, you’re not going to get a better return on investment, than had you, say, dumped all the money into infrastructure that could’ve benefited your community, created jobs, lifted people out of poverty, and decreased the systemic causes of crime.
This is what happens if way undertrained people are hired for police work. People who think with their guns.
I think they’re overtrained by fear based training like Killology. They’re afraid of everything. I guess we can now add acorns to the long list of things that justify astounding incompetence and willful endangerment of others.
It’s also a product of the America the gun lobby has built.
This guy isn’t undertrained! He served two tours in Iraq. This is literally the result of training, not only training but training cemented by military service.
This guy likely has PTSD. Should not be a cop, but you’re dumb to think he’s untrained. Not only has he likely seen live combat, the guy will likely be more proficient with firearms at 80 than you are right now; if he lives that long.
Yup, the problem isn’t necessarily the total lack of training, but that the wrong training is happening, which could potentially be worse
Absolutely, as evidenced by this guy freaking out about an acorn as if it were a silenced rifle being shot at him.
This guy needs help, and should not be in a line of service that requires him to be in potentially dangerous situations. When your brain is wired to constantly evaluate threats you will create them.
He is undertrained in handling situations. He fired blindly without a single hint of what was going on.
Fuck the police, this dumb fuck idiot could have killed someone. Hell, he wanted to.
Hope the boot tastes good.
Hell, he wanted to.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Turns out before this happened there were talking about a silencer that they could not find, and this is what was running in the cops head before the acorn dropped on the roof lol.
Man, you’re really fucking stupid if you think antagonizing people like this is a good idea.
I am loathe to use the word retarded… but I just have no other words to describe this.
It’s a trauma reaction tbh. Huge red flag that they need to be in therapy.
If there is no trauma before the police academy, it’s created and cultivated in the academy.
He has no known history of trauma. He was, IIRC, a special forces officer that was deployed (Afghanistan?), but he never saw combat operations.
This is more likely the result of being trained that everyone is out to kill cops, that cops are the “sheep dogs”, and that they need to be ready to kill people at a moment’s notice (“Killology”).
How is this a trauma reaction?
This is a big old pussy with a gun who doesn’t have the functioning braincells to think.
Being a cop is dangerous for everyone around you, not you yourself
Pigbrained
This story has an extra chromosome. Florida Cop might too.
Is it lemmy.world filtering out words they don’t like? Who is censoring free speech? Why am I seeing removed everywhere?
It’s your own instance what’s censoring the word.
Thanks for the info, TIL
When the founding fathers wrote the first amendment, they specifically aimed to protect unrestricted use of slurs on private web services. /s
Lol
Police aren’t brave, they 're the biggest cowards in societies, and we let them kill without consequence… This should frighten you
One of the biggest reasons I’m glad I did an enlistment in the Army is having got a couple years experience in Iraq to genuinely understand what a fucking joke American cops are.
Florida Man has nothing on Florida Squirrel. This brave officer barely escaped a brazen assassination attempt by the infamous terrorists, Squirrels Anonymous!
Damn, if squirrels started going after fascists in uniforms we really could start getting some serious positive momentum couldn’t we.
