[WDT] PRESIDENT'S DAY [NSFW]

I grew up in a rural area with few kids my age, and spent a good deal of time alone as a younger kid. As a result, while I’m very social, I love being alone- or at least having time alone to myself on a regular basis. I really enjoy eating alone. I’ve done it plenty while traveling for work, and still go out to eat alone if the family is away or busy.

I cared for my mother for 16 years, almost to the day, after my father died. Years ago I would post on here about her occasionally. She had mental health issues, and I eventually had to handle nearly everything for her, although I never provided true medical care. I arranged for live-in nursing then eventually a nursing home, and she died during the early phases of the pandemic.

She was a handful. I did what was necessary, and everything worked out about as well as it could.

 

Kinda slow weekend around here. Y'all want to talk about Florida Cop and the Acorn? Imagine being a handcuffed black man in custody and having 20-30 bullets fired at you! Thankfully not injured. Surely I'm not the only idiot to see this.

If you think this should be serious discussion, please move it.

 

I read the cop resigned. Looked like attempted murder to me, by both officers, but I highly doubt that's where it will go. I think they already cleared the female officer, said she acted correctly given the information she had. Other than unloading her gun in the direction of a suspect without actually hearing shots fired.

 

My nephew just got accepted to a police force and I am just waiting for him to be in a video like this, or worse, with someone dead. The kid is an idiot with rage issues. I saw him cry and throw his monitor at the wall because he lost a call of duty match. He was 17. I have met a lot of dumb people in my life, and he is among the dumbest. Not even aggressively dumb, like 5G covid-trump-antivax people(soon though I am sure) , but literally nothing going on inside his head. He was going to join the army, but the army recruiter after knowing him a few weeks suggested he would be ”better suited for the Marines”.

Once in the Marines they couldn’t figure out what the fuck to do with him. They had him doing basic inventory until he fucked that up. He was eventually separated before his contract was even done because he was just too big of a fuck up.
Somehow, despite being out of the police academy for all of 2 months he managed to buy a 750000 dollar house. I assume a VA loan, but I don’t know what math people were doing to think he could afford it. When he fucks that up, whoo boy things will get bad.

Now he has a limited amount of training, a gun and the citizens of California out there just one wrong word away from triggering his rage.

 

I don't know how we fix the problems of screening for decent officers that will remain calm in circumstances which most people would fuck up. Sadly, I also don't think people with the power to fix it know any better than I do. If we're being told the truth about this man's past, he was a combat vet. You'd think he'd keep a cooler head.

If I was the man in the backseat, I'd be instructing an attorney to find out whether the officer was receiving VA benefits for PTSD. I hope someone familiar with that stuff looks at for the young man that was fucking shot at for no reason. Like all the airline pilots with PTSD ratings that got caught flying passengers, PTSD sufferers shouldn't be in law enforcement. They are literally not right in the head. I should know, I'm married to one.

 

That more an indicator of how bad recruiting/retention is for police right now. The one's you want who are capable have other options with a fraction of the negatives. The fact he was released from his enlistment early is a huge red flag.

LE needs to do more to squash the warrior cop/sheep dog fantasy.

The starting rate for new officers in my area (northern Virginia) is ~$65k a year base pay. Many departments have a lot of built in mandatory overtime, anything from special events that require "all hands" such as parades or festivals, as well as three hours mandatory overtime after making an arrest to fill out paperwork. It's not hard to double that $65k. Still I'm surprised a bank approved a $750k loan. Even less so if it's a VA loan.

Longer & more indepth initial training would be a start. Teach better they don't need to pull weapons so quickly in an encounter. Not everything is a fucking nail.

PTSD shouldn't be an immediate disqualification, but it should drive an automatic review.

Btw, you do know a PTSD rating isn't a disqualification to pilot commercial? It's your current mental status that matters.

Fuck if PTSD was an instant disqualification for careers, you'd remove over half the possible candidate pool.

 

What is it, 6 weeks training to become a cop, 2 years to cut hair?

Right, it was because they omitted it on their medical applications. It's a long, expensive process to get a medical with PTSD and many other past mental health conditions. Childhood ADHD, whether it was an accurate diagnosis or not, any past depression or anxiety treatment, all a giant hassle to overcome and get an appropriate medical card for commercial flying.

 

Stories like this are why I wish there was a "hey, y'all need to watch the fuck out" hotline. Obviously you'd have to deal with people abusing it, and the politics of getting it funded are more for the serious thread stuff, but as a gun owner who knows a bunch of dumbass gun owners (and people who are cops for the wrong reasons) it would be nice to have a place to call and be like "hey, so and so is a cop, and they said they get a rush from arresting immigrants"

 

They keep acting like they have so much to fear. No, they just fucking fear everything. And they’re dumber than shit— from parking occupied cruisers on live railroad tracks to strangling kids for walking home “too nervously”, what’s next?

If the guy in the cruiser died, the cops wouldn’t be in trouble. They’d arrest the acorn for murder by proxy instead. It’s their go-to escape clause every time they kill innocent bystanders.

 

The female officer that baffles me just as much, and how she gets cleared for it. At 0:40 they start playing her POV. The guy starts yelling shots fired and you can tell she's confused and she asks where and then starts shooting at almost the exact same time as the acorn guy after he did all his tuck and rolls. How does she get a pass on that? She obviously didn't here shots, didn't even know where to shoot, mag dumped on the car occupied by a handcuffed man anyway.

We live on this little peninsula, cut off from the rest of our county. We never see deputies nearby because, to get here, they have to leave the state, drive about ten miles on NC roads and then re-enter VA, their county and jurisdiction. And it's fucking awesome, to just not have to deal with them most of the time.

 

I'm curious what kind of Memorandums of Agreement (MOA's) your area has with NC emergency services. Not just cops, but fire and paramedic services.

 

I'm in the middle of trying to get the VA to adjust my rating and cover me for PTSD as well as burn pit exposure. In the initial denial they essentially said "you meet criteria, but we don't see a correlation."

 

I'm sure there are some, not sure how much quicker it would make any response time. We're about as far you can get, from any direction, from civilization in this particular area. It's all volunteer FD in these little towns, so those guys have to get to the FD before they even start heading our way. I hope we never have to find out how long it actually takes them.

It's a shitty process, and you get to keep doing it until they make your rating permanent, which happened for my wife in 2018, I think. At least, that's how it went with us. She was hurt in 2010. On limdu until med boarded out in 2012, basically didn't have to do anything but check in. They implanted her first spinal cord stimulator a few days before her med board. They called us and said she didn't need even to come to the meeting. Got out at 70% and bumped to 100 later. She had to go back for evaluations, I think, 4 times before she was made permanent and total. Then she went a while without having to go, just had to sign release of information forms from outside doctors, and then one day got a letter saying she was now considered permanent and total.