Here’s some body cam footage from a Florida cop who was assaulted by an acorn. He hears a noise, drops and rolls and unloads a clip into his own police car, asks if he’s been hit, and gets his buddies to advance menacingly on the wounded vehicle.
It was all triggered by an acorn falling from a tree (who knows, it could have been thrown by an armed assault squirrel.) It would be comical, except for the sounds of the neighborhood citizens screaming in fear, and that they had a guy handcuffed and trapped in the backseat of the car. He’s fine, just traumatized, and the crazed cop has been fired.
Has anybody considered that maybe the cops have way too many guns? I’m not even talking about defunding the police, but just taking most of their weapons away.
…and your old colonial power does not even give the coppers any guns.
What an oak! Er, joke..
Except the handcuffed unarmed prisoner in the car and the neighbours and the scary lack of training and ability to tell threat from,well, acorn.
Opposite of ideal cop really. Gun use as fist resort fired wildly and – in this case thankfully – inaccurately.
Look, clearly the cop car was in on the squirrel conspiracy and deserved summary execution in the street.
I’ve never been shot before. I’ve never been hit by a falling acorn. I’d like to think I’d be able to tell the difference though.
The oak tree knew the cop was dangerous and stood its ground.
Should be referred to as “the nutty cop.”
I’m shocked the cop got fired. I guess he demonstrated he couldn’t aim well enough to kill an unarmed detainee properly?
Oh wait, per the daily beast story, he wasn’t fired. He resigned. Ok, my faith in ACAB is restored.
Calm down, Barney!
@ #9
Couldn’t have been Barney. Everybody knows Andy allows him only one bullet, which he must keep in his shirt pocket. May be Andy was on to something.
Floriduh, so the cop should have been beaned by a coconut. Or a torpid iguana.
When he started firing there was a person on the road further behind to the left of the car. In addition to the guy in the backseat, that was another fatality waiting to happen.
Also, luckily the two cops with the assault riffles had at least a couple of brain cells more than Rambo cop. If they would have started firing too…
So happy that the police in my country does not normally wear guns – although the reponsible minister and higher-ups tried multiple times to change this and get them more and stronger weapons.
She panicked because he panicked but that was deemed ‘objectively justifiable’? What was she even shooting at? Was she trying to hit as many bystanders as possible?
Anywhere in the world this is considered ‘policing’, I weep for you.
I guess they’ll add it to the charges of the person detained in the vehicle…
If he shot and killed a squirrel, I could forgive him.
He emptied his whole magazine without identifying a threat, paranoid, needs to be drug tested.
@9 and 10. This is more like Pryzbylewski from The Wire. Perhaps, having left the police force, this guy will also find his better self and realize his higher calling in education.
@16 As an instructor for gun safety?
Officer Hernandez (I think – the linked story spells his name two ways) evidently knew from “news” reports that the US faces an imminent civil war, and defended his nation accordingly.
HIstory will record that the Battle of Kissimmee ended in a draw.
This was the ideal outcome: no one – including the squirrel- physically injured, an unsuitable police officer separated from his work.
Question: what color was the squirrel?
Minutes before this hit the news, my sister told me this joke: “Cigarettes are like squirrels – perfectly harmless until you stick one in your mouth and light it on fire.” It appears squirrels can be even more dangerous than that!
The steroids so many of these cops take doesn’t help with the whole aggression thing. He resigned, but will probably be working at another police department soon.
#21, that’s what gets me…he “resigned”, so they consider the matter settled and done.
The fact that he opened fire randomly on an innocent prisioner AND put the neighbourhood in danger from stray bullets was irrelevant. He’s not being charged with “attempted murder” or even “negligent attempted manslaughter”. As far as the cops are concerned, firing your gun on a vehicle without any reason at all is NOT a criminal offence if you have a badge.
Now the fun game:YOU try it as a civilian. Get startled and randomly fire on a parked empty vehicle. When the cops show up to arrest you, point to this video and tell them you want the same treatment ’cause you were scared. See how far you get…
back of the envelope calc:
an acorn falling from a tree will hit you at say, 10 m/s. a bullet will hit you at say, 1000 m/s. The kinetic energy of the bullet is 10,000 times the kinetic energy of the acorn. if the bullet lodges in your bullet proof vest and dissipates that energy over a 3 cm stopping distance, that is a 50 kN average force, which acting locally on a say, a 1 kg chunk of your body, causes a 50,000 m/s^2 or 5000 gees of acceleration on the impact site.
i would think you could tell the difference between the bump of an acorn and the thousands of newtons force of the bullet hitting causing thousands of gees of acceleration.
Hopefully the civil justice system will provide some measure of redress for the detained suspect, 22-year-old Marquis Jackson, something he will surely never see from the criminal justice system.
re Robbo @23: The acorn didn’t even hit the officer. It hit the vehicle, the sound of which the officer mistook for gunfire.
I remember being pleasantly amazed when we were traveling in England. The police officers were carrying only tasers, and they were so polite and helpful to tourists! We soon learned to walk right up to them to ask directions, and we were greeted with smiles. Definitely not what we were used to.
The only time that we saw some cops with actual guns was in King’s Cross train station. I don’t know why they were there, but it seemed sensible that the busy train station was well guarded.
When we traveled in Japan, it was even more amazing. If we asked a police officer (unarmed!) for directions, he or she might leave their post to push my wheelchair and see that we found our way to where we were going.
I loved that being an older disabled person made me a VIP wherever we went in Japan.
#25, that’s right, the acorn hit the CAR. Literally nothing touched him at all…
So remember when he’s screaming “I’m hit! I’m HIT!!”, after rolling to the ground, can someone tell me what he felt that felt like a gunshot?? Thinking you’re being shot at is one thing, but why did he think he was HIT? Did his imagination feel like his skin and muscles ripping from a bullet puncture???
Fucking paranoid piggies, ain’t they?
Well, from what I hear and read I don’t have a lot of trust in the US police but from my only two encounters with them back in the 1980’s they were fine.
Number 1 was asking for directions in a small town in Michigan. Very helpful officer even if I did interrupt him chatting up a rather pretty blonde.
Number 2 was chatting with an officer in the river-side party area of St Louis about 10 PM on a Saturday night while I was out with my Rugby Club. Again, a nice guy. The rest of the club was panicking, assuming I, already had had too much beer.
I suspect recruiting standards may have declined in the last 25 years.
I just read that the acorn was charged with assault with intent to injure and assault on a police officer. So the officer was innocent and has been completely vindicated. I hope the acorn, if convicted (and it’s obviously guilty), gets a maximum sentence and is put in a prison cell with the Biker Squirrels From Hell gang. It will deserve whatever they do to it! All cop-assaulting acorns, and any other nuts that assault LEOs, should get locked away in a prison and the key thrown away!
OK, officers should be given stringent tests for psychological problems and just how they react to sudden stimuli. I expect a lot of cops would fail if held to a high standard of not shooting just because of a sudden noise. This guy should never have been allowed to wear a uniform or carry a weapon. I know there are good cops – I’ve known some – but the whole recruiting, training and disciplinary system is clearly corrupt.
#1:@birgerjohansson
That’s not completely true these days. Around 5% of police officers in England and Wales are armed, operating from Armed Response Vehicles in situations where deployment of firearms is deemed warranted. They conduct about 20,000 firearms operations per year, but the key point is that there’s only a handful of weapons discharges in any one year.
Between 2011 and 2020, only 2019 reached double figures (13) while the average is 6 discharges a year. The NYPD alone has 40-50 discharges (likely multiple per counted incident) per year by comparison.
Police in England and Wales shot and killed 26 people between 2013 and 2022 — fewer than three per year. In the US, it’s over a thousand a year, and rising. If the US police shot and killed citizens at the same rate as British police, around 15 people would die per year.
That’s what an armed society will do for you — police killings at 67 times the rate of a normal country…
#26:@magistramarla
They tend to deploy visibly armed police in places considered a high value target for terrorists. You sometimes see them at the major airports, like Heathrow too.
They told us it was dangerous
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ACORN_in_the_United_States