“We got a complaint of a vehicle matching your description and your license plate, waving a gun out the window.”
Here’s the problem.
The car identified by dispatch: “It’s going to be a beige or tan colored Toyota…”
The car the Forney TX cops pulled over: red Nissan Maxima.
There’s more:
Dispatch: “Do you have a license plate on the Toyota?”
Caller: “We can’t catch up with it. There’s no way without us killing someone to catch up with this car because they’re doing a hundred. They passed us and my husband said that he showed a gun.”
There had been no license plate reported by the caller to dispatch when this squad car took off after a red, not tan, car.
Oh. And the driver they held guns before throwing on the handcuffs? (Listen to the conflicting instructions – stop! no, keep backing up.)
A woman, with four children in the car.
Yet the suspects identified by dispatch: “… four black males.”
Kametra Barbour appears to have been a victim of driving while black as well as lousy communication between dispatch and officers on the street.
This behavior should make you shake with anger:
This happened on August 9, 2014 in Forney, TX, population 14,661 and 30 minutes east of Dallas.
Yes, that’s the same day that Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, MO, another suburban shadow 650 miles away.
Look:
The make/color is wrong-wrong-wrong and the caller had given no license plate.
Moreover, another Forney squad was running the plates on a tan Toyota.
Officer 1 spots the beige- or tan-vehicle, catches up to it, and begins running its license plate while they were in the left lane.
And the caller says:
Caller: “We just passed a Forney officer. They’re ahead of him. They’re up here in the left lane [stated as Officer 1 was behind the suspect vehicle]…”
But guess what.
While Officer 1 was pulling over the correct vehicle described by the caller, Forney dispatch advises Officer 2 who ran a license plate [license plate 2] they had the correct vehicle which happened to be the burgundy Nissan Maxima, the wrong vehicle. According to audio and dashcam video, Officer 1’s traffic stop was not broadcast to the dispatch office and dispatch was unaware the caller was advising the officer with his lights on [Officer 1] was stopping the correct vehicle.
MSM collusion
The headlines make me almost as angry as the arrest because the organizations with power — news media — frame this as an accident, a mistake.
When I teach the motorcycle safety class, I tell my students that accidents are things that happen which are truly outside of your control. What happens when two cars (or motorcycles) get entangled is a crash, not an accident.
Despite criticism from safety professionals, scientists continue to use the word accident, meaning an unexpected, unintended injury, or event…
When the word is used to describe human error, it frequently does so in a way that inhibits examination of the factors contributing to the error … (NIH)
Yes, the cops made a “mistake” in the context that their actions were wrong. But there are several types of mistakes:
- Slips: your intent was accurate but the execution was not. Misdialing a known telephone number is a slip.
- Lapses: you failed because you forgot something, either due to memory and/or inattention. An example of a lapse is leaving the house but forgetting to turn off the lights.
- Mistakes: your plan or intention was faulty. An uninformed mistake means that you did not know the correct course of action.
- Violations: “differ from slips, lapses and mistakes because they are deliberate … i.e. somebody did something knowing it to be against the rules.”
My problem with calling this a “mistake” is that we think of mistakes as (innocent) human error.
I do not see the deliberate detention of a car that does not match the description from dispatch as human error. I see it as a violation of common sense.
And do you really think that the outlines of four children under age 10 look like four adult males?
***
Bless the citizen who initially called in the erratic driver. Because she called back to tell the Forney cops that they had pulled over the wrong car.
Dispatch to Caller 2: “They already have the vehicle pulled over they said.”
Caller 2: “No!”
Dispatch: “Okay, alright, thank you mam.”
And they called back a third time.
Nearly two weeks after the incident, the complainant, when speaking to inForney.com, remembered every digit of the license plate number on the suspect vehicle, “He was in the left lane, that’s the car he [Officer 1] lit up, and I said that’s the one. Then all of a sudden they shot off of the highway to a red car…. I tried to tell them they had the wrong car … How you mix up a tan or gold car with a red one, I don’t know.”
Despite the clear screw up outlined by inForney.com (published Sunday), there had been no public acknowledgment of wrong-doing on the part of the Forney police department, according to media reports.
What has the U.S. turned into?
- Mom and kids accidentally pulled over at gunpoint, 11 Alive (warning, video ad auto-starts)
- Mother Mistaken for Criminal, Handcuffed at Gunpoint in Front of Children, ABC
- Texas police apologize for mistakenly pulling over mom and kids at gunpoint, Today.com
- Forney woman, children accidentally pulled over at gunpoint by police, NYC Criminal Lawyer
More Human failure (pdf).
Known for gnawing at complex questions like a terrier with a bone. Digital evangelist, writer, teacher. Transplanted Southerner; teach newbies to ride motorcycles. @kegill (Twitter and Mastodon.social); wiredpen.com