Just as a note: this is a rarity for me. My job requires a certain amount of discretion that precludes me from blogging about it, so to be safe, I usually make it a policy to steer clear of law enforcement-dispatch related topics, just to be safe. But this was unusual enough, I felt it was worth the write-up.
My Dad mentioned this incident to me a couple of days ago- and surprise, surprise, the Great Guru Instapundit is also on the case, so I followed his link to actually get some footage of this and found it to be frankly, a little dubious.
What's the hubub? Well in Ohio, if you have a Concealed Carry Permit, you're supposed to verbally inform any police officer you encounter- such as, for example on a traffic stop as we see in this case. The problem this gentlemen encountered was that the officer in question didn't let him get a word in edgewise (as well as, I'm sorry, acting like a giant tool pretty much most of the time.)
That said, it's important to note that along with domestics, traffic stops are amongst the most potentially dangerous things that cops do. They're trained to know that and they're trained to pay attention and stay alert while they're doing them. Throw in the fact that these guys were working very late at night in a very bad part of town and they were probably even more on edge. That doesn't excuse the behavior in any way shape or form, if this stuff is on the level- but a few things jumped out at me.
First of all, they leave the driver in the car while they search it. This made me do a double take right off the bat. I'm not a cop but if you work around them long enough, you pick up on how things are supposed to work and leaving that guy in the car struck me as a major no-no and a huge officer safety issue. (Part of the reason I think this particular cop loses his shit when he realizes the guy has a CCW and they had just searched the car with an armed subject inches away from their heads.)
Second of all, I want to hear the audio recordings of this call, but something funky was going on in Dispatch. First of all, it takes them 11 minutes to let the officers know that the registered owner of the vehicle has a concealed carry permit. Yet curiously they can't get the guy back when they run him? Hmmm... that makes no sense to me. If the driver is the RO of the car and they ran him and found a CCW permit on file- then why can't they get the name he gives the officer back? There's a discrepancy there that's worth exploring. Never mind the fact it takes them 11 minutes to let them know he's got a permit to carry- usually things like that pop right away at you (at least they do on our system) and it's an officer safety issue all over again. I'm not going to speak to the policies of that particular agency, but I know if I find information like that, I let the officer know right away. It's an officer safety issue.
I'm not going to go right out and say this is a crock of shit that somebody made up- as it appears the officer in question for Canton PD was suspended from all duties because of it, but there's something not quite right about this video. It seems a little too good to be true (an opinion shared by the one of the LTs I mentioned this too who had seen it)- and I don't care if you're the crappiest cop on God's green earth. Barney Fife wouldn't have left that driver in the car if he had to search the vehicle.
Even if the video seems a little dodgy, it's still a good point. Notification laws are silly- if they must do it, they should have something on the DL or another card that just gets handed to the officer right away, right off the bat without the mandate for any verbalization. As this video demonstrates, there's a real safety issue that has to be considered- for both gun users and police officers. (And as Instapundit notes- it's a good lesson for police officers and one they should already know: 'Do the job like your grandmother is watching.')
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