Police Perpetrator Protection in Action

Three Noble, Oklahoma police officers have been suspended and are under investigation after one of them apparently killed a five year old boy last Friday. Who are they? We don't know, because Noble Police Chief Ben Daves hasn't seen fit to let the public know who they are, even though 4 days have passed since the incident happened.

Two of the officers had been dispatched to a report of a snake in a birdhouse on a piece of property in a residential neighborhood. Poisonous? Again, no solid information is forthcoming, but we can be reasonably certain that it wasn't an all-fired emergency, since the snake was in the birdhouse and not imminently endangering anyone. One of the officers allegedly decided that the situation warranted him playing Wyatt Earp and shooting the snake, without making sure of his backstop, or maybe even thinking about whether that was the appropriate course of action to take. The boy, Austin Haley, was fishing with his grandfather at a nearby pond when a shot hit the water close to them. The grandfather was attempting to pull the boy to cover, while trying to shout that they were there, when a second shot hit the boy in the head. He died later at a local hospital.

Of course, since the shooter was a cop, a veil of secrecy has been drawn over the entire investigation:

"On Monday, three Noble police officers were placed on administrative leave. The officers responded Friday evening to a report of a snake in a birdhouse, according to a statement released Monday by Noble Police Chief Ben Daves. It was the first public statement by Daves, who has refused to name any of the officers involved in the shooting."

Why have the names of the officers involved not been released? If it were you or I that had made such a wrongheaded and deadly decision, we would be sitting in jail right now, and our names would be all over the ten o'clock news as the top story, and rightly so. We would be portrayed as "reckless" and "negligent", and the viewers would have been informed by the "authorities" that tragedies such as this are the reason that only "highly trained professionals" are competent and qualified enough to carry firearms.

According to the story, only one officer fired the shots, so why was the other officer, and more importantly, the third officer who wasn't on the scene, suspended as well? The only reason I can think of is that the other two officers tried to cover up what the shooter had done. As a matter of fact, according to the grandfather, when the two officers came out of the woods and happened onto the scene of the grandfather trying to save his grandson, they unbelievably didn't even bother to tell him that they were the ones who had been doing the shooting:

"'Then two officers came out of the brush over there,” he said. "They didn't tell us they were the ones who had been shooting or that they had shot him. They didn't admit a doggone thing.'"

That's some "serving and protecting", eh?

Tragically, the grandfather also hits the nail on the head when summing up how he feels about the officer's negligence:

"'I'm not saying the cop shot him on purpose,” Tracy said. "It was an accident. But let me tell you — if I had a kid and put him in this car and didn't put him in a car seat and he got killed on the way to town, they'd charge me with murder ... and what this cop did is a lot worse than that. ... There was no reason for him to kill my grandson.'"

If these are indeed the circumstances of the case, that's even more reason to get the officers' names out there, in order to show that the department is serious about getting promptly and accurately to the bottom of the incident. Simply releasing the names wouldn't jeopardize the investigation if it was a private citizen accused of firing those shots, so it shouldn't matter if the officers' names are released as well. In my opinion, the fact that they haven't is a matter of the department desperately trying to save face.

How about letting us see some names, Chief? Carrying these officers' water is only going to put you deeper into the legal hole your department is already in.

h/t to Xavier for the heads-up on the story.