Chilling Police Radio Dispatches Tell the Story of Tracking the Las Vegas Shooter

It’s fashionable lately to hate cops. Just ask everyone who takes a knee before an NFL football game why they’re on the ground.

It’s also fashionable lately to hate the media. We do our fair share of body checking media into the glass here at RedState, with everyone from the far left to the far right included in the crosshairs if they go off the rails.

Suffice to say it’s a rare and sunny day when a major national media outlet showcases the heroism and brilliance of a local police department in their attempt to apprehend a killer.

Today is such a day.

The Wall Street Journal has an excellent package up today of police radio dispatches and conversations between officers on the ground as they tried to triage the madness at the Las Vegas strip and turn it into a plan to capture a killer.

Besides the transcript and timestamp of each dispatch, the WSJ package has only the following text:

The following recordings are selected police radio communications from when the shooting started on Sunday shortly after 10:00 p.m. through 11:30 p.m. when police entered the sole shooter’s hotel room. This audio reveals the chaos and confusion officers faced while tracking the gunman’s location.

Turn on the sound on your device to hear the original audio.

The sole gunman, Stephen Paddock, shot for nine to 11 minutes before killing himself.

58 people were killed and 527 injured.

It’s an incredible piece of digital journalism, accompanied by scrollable auto-play audio, images from the concert ground, as well as a background image that serves as something of a map relevant to the radio dispatch playing in the foreground. The whole thing tells, in the cops’ own words, the story of how officers discovered where the shooter was located, their recognition he was in possession of a fully automatic weapon, and their eventual plan to confront, capture and/or kill him.

Worth a listen, even if just to remember that despite the public relations beating both the cops and the media take at times, they are still capable of doing great work on behalf of the people they serve.

The post LISTEN: Chilling Police Radio Dispatches Tell the Story of Tracking the Las Vegas Shooter appeared first on RedState.