Welcome to America: Texas Police Sniper Guns Down Immigrants From Helicopter

“During the pursuit, the vehicle appeared to have a typical ‘covered’ drug load in the bed of the truck,” Vinger said. “DPS aircraft joined the pursuit of the suspected drug lord, which was traveling at reckless speeds, endangering the public. A DPS trooper discharged his firearm from the helicopter to disable the vehicle.”

No drugs were found in the truck.

During interviews at a Border Patrol facility, survivors told consular officials that the men died from gunfire, and that their cover was flimsy and blowing off, enough so that the trooper in the helicopter could see them.

Vinger said the officer who discharged his weapon was placed on administrative leave.

[...]The policy warns that when shooting at a vehicle “there may be a risk of harm to occupants of the suspect vehicle who may not be involved, or involved to a lesser extent, with the actions of the suspect creating the threat.”

Use of force expert Geoffrey Alpert, a professor at the University of South Carolina who has studied pursuits at police departments across the country, said he’d “never heard of” law enforcement agencies allowing officers to shoot at vehicles from helicopters.

“There’s a trend to restrict officers from shooting at vehicles at all,” Alpert said. “It’s not an efficient or effective policy to let officers shoot from vehicles, and certainly not from a helicopter.”

[...]“We can’t give up swaths of land to organized thugs and criminals,” DPS Director McCraw said recently. Indeed, we can’t “give up huge swaths of land to organized thugs and criminals,” that’s why we need to shut these out of control police and border patrol down immediately.
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Chris runs the website InformationLiberation.com, you can read more of his writings here. Follow infolib on twitter here.

2012-10-30 18:02:56

Source: http://weeklyintercept.blogspot.com/2012/10/welcome-to-america-texas-police-sniper.html