The family of a man fatally shot in New Mexico by police officers responding to the wrong house sued the department for wrongful death and other claims in federal court, according to a complaint filed on Friday in the U.S. District Court of New Mexico.
Robert Dotson, 52, was shot and killed in the doorway of his house in Farmington after local police officers opened fire after they said they saw he had a gun.
Police knocked on Dotson’s door at 11:30 p.m. on April 5, according to the complaint filed in court. Dotson grabbed his gun from the top of the refrigerator and went to open the front door. The complaint says “police vehicles were parked down the street and did not have their lights on.”
Three officers standing outside the door immediately opened fire, according to the complaint. Dotson was hit by 12 bullets. His wife, Kimberly, wearing just her robe, came down the stairs to find out what happened, the complaint says, and the officers fired an additional 19 bullets at her but missed.
New Mexico State Police issued a statement saying that Farmington police were responding to a domestic violence call but went to the wrong address.
Yes, yes the warrior mindset training course, of seeing the common person as an enemy. One of the many problems I alluded to cops having. Again cops have many problems and realistically its partly because they are human. This typically isn’t a problem for many organizations, well it is but its more on an individual basis rather than collective unless you discount the higher ups and middle management (but that is its own can of worms), but back to my point its not a problem because the offending parties fucking get fired/charged for this shit. Cops for some reason help each other out and since they are the enforcement branch of the law, they get quite a bit of wiggle room, which is stupid. I just think its delusional to think cops are mass serial killers when realistically 10-27% of cops ever discharge their firearm in the line of duty outside of the range (in the US). Many cops are fucking dickheads but I just think that past user is a bit delusional. Again policing in the US has major problems but we can’t lose sight of the fucking facts that most cops have never fired their weapon and probably even fewer have actually killed someone (justly or not). We as the people just want the people who fuck up drastically to be punished, so ACAB is merely a statement of the criticizing the organization rather than all the individuals inside it.
Not all of them are serial killers, but there are definitely serial killers on police forces, and they’re almost never arrested for it.
The other cops protect them. They might even join in on a racist beating or two, or they might look away and keep quiet to protect that thin blue line, either way, they’re all bad apples. Because that’s what happens when you leave one bad apple in with the rest, they all go rotten.
I, for one, don’t want “bad guys” to be murdered out of hand. I don’t think the police should have that power, I don’t think the government should have the power to kill its citizens at all.
Police officers should be required to live in the neighborhoods they patrol, and should have third party oversight boards with the power to charge police, and only police, with crimes.
I agree with most of what you said but I disagree here. Like I would love for it to be easy to subdue “bad guys” but taking down someone non lethally and without any other major risk factors involved while subduing them is a bit unrealistic, primarily when they are armed(either with a firearm or any other kind of weapon). I want to see every “bad guy”(or man who isn’t even involved) see their day in court but we don’t live in a fantasy land where you can knock someone out without any ill effects like in the movies. Like many of us are talking behind a screen, there is a major problem with cop training and I 100% support them having to train far more but we have to keep in mind death can come in a fraction of a second and people are going to be on edge because of that. Again I already brought up my problems with the warrior training since they do heavily focus on this aspect and its way too focused on, they seriously see footage of cops hesitating and getting killed, so they program cops to always be afraid of every interaction but I just don’t think we should completely discount death can come in a mere moment. In America, there are literally more guns than fucking people here and that is part of the problem.
That attitude of “sometimes they have to” is the reason why there are serial killers on police forces in the US.
There are literal gangs in the LA SD. They have tattoos based on how many people they’ve killed, and they get away with that shit because “sometimes they ‘have to’” .
So no. If you kill someone as a cop, that’s it. You’re no longer a cop.
If it was actually justified, you get counseling and job training for something else, or maybe an early retirement in rare cases. If it wasn’t, then you go to prison for murder.
Also, don’t arm the regular cops. If you need a gun, you can check one out, or get it out of your patrol car’s locked compartment.
Cops should be given zero trust in this, because they’ve always instantly abused that trust.
They absolutely do not most of the time. They usually get put on paid leave, the police union circles the wagons around them, and if there is an inquiry, they get let off.
I think you are missing my point. My point I will say was rambly so I will give you that, but it was saying people who aren’t cops typically suffer consequences for their actions ie you cuss at a customer, you will likely be fired even when you are probably in the right. So I agree with you. The is the problem with cops in the US, almost 0 oversight.
Its not great but I will say its hard to say if they were really aiming at her or they just sort of continued to mag dump on the husband. The Glock 22 is the most common pistol for law enforcement. Standard mag capacity for one is about 15 bullets. There are 3 officers so 45 bullets in total assuming these aren’t reduced size magazines and if they were you might see 10 round mags with one of their pistols already having a bullet in the chamber which would total about 31 shots. Which by looks of the total shot count, which makes me believe this may the case.
Edit: Without body cam footage, its hard to say what truly transpired but I don’t think its hard to believe a person who was in the general direction where the bullets were landing will say she was being fired upon but she may not have been target. The complaint was written in this way but at the end of the day it is a story that is based on memory, human memory is a very unreliable narrator. I can’t fault her if she didn’t remember all the details properly since she did go through a rather traumatic event in many ways. Don’t take this as me saying the cops are in the right since no, they fucked up super hard. An innocent man is dead, a woman is husbandless, and their children are fatherless. There are so many ways they likely fucked this up. Hell she may even be right about every single detail but at this stage, we just don’t know the full story. Its just 2 different statement without any extra evidence to back it up until body cam footage gets released, which will likely be seen via discovery in the lawsuit.
But the footage is there, that is likely why the reporting on this has been so much less “speculative”…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qX5AnYvwR9w
Well the article doesn’t link at all any of this, yeah it does make this pretty bad.