Disabled man tries to fend off home invasion as deputies wait down the street

[CleverNickname]

I don't have a Sun Sentinal account, but I do empty cache and cookies on my computer often and that tends to reset access for a lot of news sites that permit one or two articles before locking down. Rinse and repeat.

That's doing it the hard way. A less disruptive way would be to either use private mode in your browser, or get a browser extension that lets you turn off Javascript on a per-page basis. I use uBlock Origin. Doing those gets past the vast majority of sites. There's a few others like the NYT where it will only give you the complete page content if the HTTP referrer is from a search engine site, so just copy and paste the title of the article into your favorite search engine and the page you want will most likely be in the top few results. Then since the referrer is set correctly, you get the complete content.

[beenalongtime]

I saw it broken and just figured if he wanted in he'd have gotten in, but since I don't know anything about hurricane glass I'll shut up on that point.

If it is what I think it is (similar to tornado glass), it is glass that has around an 8mm film on either side, and am not sure if tempered or safety glass basis.

[Coyotesfan97]

One of my old partners and I coined a term for what the SO apparently did on this call. We called it a DART for Delayed Action Response Team. We’d pull up on a hot call/subject with a gun and ask which house it was knowing they were far away. It’d be something like see that third light pole and the white truck. Yeah it’s passed that. One or both of us would do a scout and then we’d usually have them move up to where you could actually deal with the call and suspect. They pay us to take calculated risks. I’m not saying to bum rush shit but who do you want handling this guy?

If the call is someone trying to break into a house and the homeowners armed you’d better deal with it before someone gets shot. Yeah it might be risky but that’s why you wear body armor, have rifles, less lethal, and dogs. I can see waiting for a backup or two and then going into deal with it. If there were 18 Deputies staged around the corner that sounds like a scared supervisor. I guarantee there were Deputies that were pissed they were waiting. Especially if one of them was a dog handler.

[RJflyer]

Media sources tend to inject hyperbole into these stories, so who knows what actually occurred. But if the homeowner's account is accurate, then it definitely makes me cringe. Certainly not how those calls were handled in my experience. If county taxpayers can't get a response to an in-progress burglary of an occupied residence, then why are they paying for a $500+ million sheriff's office budget?

[Totem Polar]

Cops take a course of action that isn't aggressive enough so that they don't unwittingly smoke an innocent at night: cowards.

Cops take a course of action that is too aggressive and they unwittingly smoke an innocent: racist f'ing pigs must hang.

We've devolved to judging LEOs in a very binary manner and until we evolve from that and stop using yellow-journalism as our primary source, this is the policing you get. Deal with it.

My only beef with this quote—and I KNOW that I don’t have to tell you this—is that cops can also take a course of action and deliberately smoke a guy who is in the process of trying to kill them and they’ll still get the stinkeye from all quarters.

I’m not LE and never will be, but like everyone else, I have a dog in this hunt, because I like to park my car out front and assume it’ll be there in the am, and I like my wife to be able to procure organic eats at the market without thinking that two guys with plates and longs should go with.

We’ve arrived at the age of unreason, and I’m looking at news media and big tech on this, myself.

[/minirant]

[KellyinAvon]

If I grab the phone, dial 911, and call in the cavalry? I need them to ride all the way to my location.

[jnc36rcpd]

While I don't think the perceived failure of the SRO in the Parkland School incident is a reflection on the entire agency, I do have concerns about the department's entire performance in the attack. No one seemed to move forward until the neighboring city police arrived, a captain never seemed to take command and so forth.

I understand that we don't know what actually happened in this incident and can only go by AAR's and other sources about Parkland, but does this seem the usual conduct by BSO? I understand the whole guardian/warrior thing, but this seems a bit much.

[Joe Mac]

I could see this happening at the agency I just retired from, where not bringing enough resources to do the job optimally is a much greater organizational sin than not doing the job at all. Dither and delay until you assemble six cops, a taser, a 40mm, a coloring book, crayons, etc. etc.

[Wise_A]

If I grab the phone, dial 911, and call in the cavalry? I need them to ride all the way to my location.

I'd like to highlight--for the Regular People--some stuff (not picking on anyone). LEOs can skip freely. I don't have access to the audio from the 911 call, or even a complete transcript. How you call 911 is as important as what you're calling in for. I would be interested in hearing the how the call was put out on radio, which would go a long way to explaining how the calltaker and dispatcher interpreted the information they were receiving. The complete unedited 911 call would be very illuminating as well. What I do have is some text snippets.

First off, I'd be interested in seeing how the call was categorized, and how exactly that call type is typically handled in Broward. In my area, a calltaker would have coded that as either an Active Burglary or a Disturbance, but that's because "Disturbance" covers quite a lot of ground and can get quite an aggressive response. It would have been up to me as the in-progress police dispatcher to communicate the situation. I feel this was probably done correctly, because 18 fucking guys showed up. Non-serious stuff is generally not allowed to tie up so many available resources.

From my point of view, a report of an active burglary / prowler raises all kinds of red flags for me. Very often, these actually turn out to be mental health or intoxicated subject calls. MHU and intox both present obvious scene safety issues for patrols. MHU/intox with a weapon is an oh-shit--it happens enough around here that I'm not exactly unfamiliar with it, but not so often that it's an every-day or even every-week thing. The gentleman in this call says some distressing things: "He's breaking in, can I shoot him?" is kind've a big one. Personal bias on the part of the calltaker or dispatcher can play a role too. Did they assume this guy was not playing with a full deck because he described himself as being older and disabled?

Now, even assuming the dispatcher isn't labelling this guy crazy, even a non-MH/non-intox caller with a firearm presents a scene safety concern. While there's really no scripts for dealing with this scenario, my personal strategy is to advise the caller to gather the home's residents in an interior (preferably upstairs room), which separates them from both the attacker and the responding deputies. The last thing I want is for the deputy to be confronted with a homeowner holding a gun and the subject. Presuming I have all the information I need about the subject, I can move on to verifying that all the residents are in one place sitting tight, and then I can ask some are-you-crazy questions--do you know why someone would do this, have you had any small burglaries, etc. While that's happening I can run a check in our system to see what the caller's been up to. Once I'm comfortable they're not crazy, I can reassure them, give them updates on the response, and then give them instructions on what to do when the patrols are ready to speak with them. Bear in mind, from an industry perspective, I am given a fuckton of latitude by my agency to handle these things. I'm following some approved principles, but pretty much everything is freelance. Some places only allow you to advise callers to do stuff in the most simple and dire circumstances.

The point is this: I would label this call a shitshow, but that would be unfair to shit. The guy fucked up. His neighbors made the situation so much worse. Yes, from a dispatching/calltaking perspective, it is our job to organize chaotic input into usable information, but holy shit, they're not making it easy, and then complaining about it later.

The other part of the equation is this: you don't know what the local policy is, or who wrote it. This situation might mandate, say, a sergeant be on-scene (I've seen dumber). Hell, they might have a policy to stage like that. It would be dumb, but the police very well might not have written the policy.

In any case, I think that the angle to discuss this story is, what can we learn about it as armed citizens? Namely: don't meet attackers at the door, be calm when talking to dispatch, etc. I would also suggest encouraging your jurisdictions to pay more than $34k a year for dispatchers. This is the sort of shit you get when you cheap out.

[Stephanie B]

I could see this happening at the agency I just retired from, where not bringing enough resources to do the job optimally is a much greater organizational sin than not doing the job at all. Dither and delay until you assemble six cops, a taser, a 40mm, a coloring book, crayons, etc. etc.

What, no close-air support?