In the grand scheme of things, tornadoes, droughts, poverty, etc..., Oprah's last fling is the last thing I want to see. Glad it is not my job, but this person is making the best of it.
In other news, check out the report card on beaches in Ventura County, yup, my hometown gets an A wet or dry weather. I am still struggling to understand those classifications, no time to read the entire report. I hope the local paper will take the opportunity to write an article about something good...
I won't post the article about the Tucson shooter (won't even name him) being found unfit for trial. I am just wondering why he was not found unfit to own or use guns. That is a ruling I could have applauded. I have a hard time with how the mentally ill are treated both before and after they are either diagnosed or commit crimes. It is truly disgusting that so many people witnessed this young man falling deep into the illness and didn't do anything to help him ... if he can't go to jail for killing those people, maybe all those who passed the buck should go to jail in his place. Just saying...
And onto other not so uplifting yet strangely related news...I share this article because I think it was pretty well done. I wish the reporter had gone one step further and looked into how many of the police officers in APD are former military, what kind of training or retraining those officers get, what kind of training they get on dealing with the mentally ill... but it is a start.
Fatal APD Shootings Not Typical in Nation
Published: May 22, 2011A woman called me because she was worried about her granddaughter. She had raised the girl, who was now in a spiral of substance abuse, mental illness and violence that was testing the limits of her grandmother's love and making the woman afraid whenever the girl came around.
It's my job to listen, not to give advice. So I didn't tell her my first reaction, which was, "If you love her, don't call 911."
I regretted that thought as soon as I had it. But it wasn't anything that hasn't crossed a lot of other people's minds.
That phone call came the day after an Albuquerque police officer had fatally shot a 22-year-old man as he turned to walk back into the house where a woman had told police she was being held by a man with a gun. He held a black plastic spoon, not a gun, when he was shot.
It came a month after Albuquerque Police Department detectives serving a warrant killed a 27-year-old mentally ill man who turned on them and grabbed one of their guns.
It came three months after an APD gang officer, who described his job as "human waste disposal," pumped three shots into the back and buttocks of a 29-year-old man with a gun who was running from a traffic stop.
And it came after 2010, a year in which APD officers on duty shot 14 people and killed nine of them.
It has been a troubling and confusing trend. Each of the fatal shootings has been explained by APD, often in a way that seems reasonable. The three this year can be boiled down to "he had a gun," "he took a cop's gun" and "we thought he had a gun."
My colleague Astrid Galvan has tried to make sense of this in stories over the past year. She compared Albuquerque's police shooting numbers to those of cities of our size or bigger and found APD stands out: By the time APD had reached 10 officer shootings last year, Denver and Oklahoma City each had seven and Tucson and Mesa, Ariz., had none.
Galvan examined whether APD officers might shoot more because they are attacked more -- a frequent explanation from APD brass -- and found no consistent correlation. She even looked at whether education level influences how often police officers fire their weapons. It turns out it does. Officers with a four-year college degree are less likely to use force. In APD, only about one in four officers has a college degree.
The more angles you approach it from, the more difficult the phenomenon is to understand or to accept or to stop.
But we know from the experiences of other cities that a confrontation between police and a young, mentally disturbed man doesn't have to end the way it often seems to in Albuquerque.
A few weeks after APD's first fatal shooting of the year, National Public Radio broadcast a report on a confrontation between cops and a gun-wielding Iraq veteran in a cornfield in North Dakota.
It was one of those stories that grabs you, and I listened to it on the drive home from work and ended up sitting in my car in my driveway in the dark, waiting to hear how it ended.
Brock Savelkoul, a young Army veteran who had suffered a concussion when a rocket exploded near him in Iraq, grabbed six guns out of his family's home and took off in his truck over the North Dakota countryside.
By the time police were called, he had pointed a gun at a convenience store clerk, and police knew he was well-armed and violent.
They chased him for an hour at speeds up to 105 mph and at one point, Savelkoul did a U-turn in a farm field and aimed his truck at rookie North Dakota Highway Patrol trooper Megan Christopher's cruiser.
When Savelkoul's truck finally ran out of gas, Christopher was one of six officers who drew their weapons and took cover behind their cars.
The radio piece included audio from what would become a two-hour standoff. You could hear Christopher breathlessly yelling, "Step out of the vehicle. Put your hands in the air, in the air. Put your hands in the air. Do it now!"
Savelkoul eventually got out of the truck with an AR-15 in his right hand. Officers yelled at him to drop the gun, but neither Christopher nor any of the other officers fired.
"Go ahead and put the gun down, Brock. Brock, it's not worth it," Christopher said. "Lay the gun down."
Savelkoul, still holding the weapon, walked directly toward police. A dash-cam video captured him pacing and gesturing with his guns. He fired his assault rifle into his pickup and asked to be killed.
"Go ahead, shoot me!" he yelled. "Do it."
Still, no one fired.
Christopher kept talking, and she finally persuaded him to put down the gun and let her approach. Savelkoul was arrested and charged with three felonies. He was sent to a VA hospital for treatment for traumatic brain injury and PTSD and was eventually released with charges dropped. He is getting better.
Christopher explained to the NPR reporter why she didn't fire her service weapon that night and add another name to the list of those who have died by "suicide by cop."
"He didn't point the weapon at us. He didn't threaten us," she said. "He was a man standing there with a gun."
After Savelkoul was on the ground and handcuffed, Christopher said, she thanked him for his military service.
APD's fatal shootings, I'm sorry to say, blur together in my mind. But that's an image that lingers.
UpFront is a daily front-page news and opinion column. Comment directly to Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com. Go to www.abqjournal.com/letters/new to submit a letter to the editor.
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