and we find the following:
In one case, the officer explained that he had a special technique for detecting who was hiding a gun. He had learned it from a newspaper article that described certain clues to watch for: a hand brushing a pocket, a lopsided gait, a jacket or sweater that seems mismatched or out of season.
That was one reason, he told a judge, that he was certain the man he saw outside a Brooklyn housing project last September was concealing a gun. The man, Anthony McCrae, had moved his hand along the front of his waistband, as if moving a weapon, the officer said. Sure enough, a search turned up a gun.
The judge, John Gleeson of Brooklyn federal court, asked the officer, Kaz Daughtry, how successful his method had been in other cases.
Officer Daughtry replied that over a three-day period, he and his partner had stopped 30 to 50 people. One had a gun.
Calling that a “dismal record,” the judge said the officer’s technique was “little more than guesswork.”
Moreover, Judge Gleeson said he did not believe that Officer Daughtry could even have seen the gesture he found so suspicious: Mr. McCrae’s hand was in front of him and the officer was about 30 feet behind.
So to put this in perspective, the police correctly suspect a person has a gun 3.33% of the time and they are wrong on deciding people have guns 96.7% of the time. Therefore the police, with a 96.7% chance of being wrong about Guzman, Bell and Benefield went and shot them up anyway.
And then there is this:
The judge, Laura Taylor Swain, heard the officer, Sean Lynch, testify that he had shined his flashlight through the window of a parked sport utility vehicle one night in the Bronx and had seen a gun. The driver’s lawyer said that Officer Lynch could not have seen the gun because the car’s windows were heavily tinted.
So after sunset one evening in January 2006, the judge walked outside the Manhattan federal courthouse and shined a flashlight into the vehicle. She could see nothing.
Her inspection and other evidence, she wrote, “give the lie” to Officer Lynch’s account, which she called “impossible.” Prosecutors dropped the case.
The police, to be sure, have a difficult job trying to root out guns without overstepping the law. Some judges acknowledged this in court, saying they believed not that officers had lied, but rather that they had failed to recall an event accurately, perhaps because of its brevity, a limited vantage point or the subsequent passage of time.
And some expressed sympathy for the police. Judge Gleeson said in one case that while he found two officers’ testimony contradictory, he did not want to imply they had lied.
No, lets not imply that police lie. Nooooooo. They don't recall. They make split second decisions like getting out of vehicles and walking in front of vehicles they "think" gunfire is coming from and then shoot into the windows of those vehicles fearing guns they never saw. No, the simply "don't recall." Only "thugs" lie.
