Florida Police Under Scrutiny for Shooting Cop-Killer 68 Times

[High Plains]

From Newsweek--http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15262111/site/newsweek/

68 Bullets
Law enforcement fired 110 shots at an armed man who killed one deputy and wounded another. Was the force excessive or justified?

Updated: 12:16 a.m. CT Oct 14, 2006
Oct. 14, 2006 - It all began with a simple traffic stop. Polk County Sheriff’s Deputy Doug Speirs pulled over Angilo Freeland just before noon on Sept. 28 for speeding along an avenue in Lakeland, Fla. But when Speirs asked for Freeland’s driver’s license, Freeland, 27, produced a dubious-looking state ID card. Would he have to go to jail for not having a valid license? he asked the deputy, according to authorities. Moments later, Freeland fled into a wooded area beside the road. Speirs radioed for backup, and soon Deputy Matt Williams arrived with his dog Diogi. The three set off into the woods. Freeland apparently hid behind the exposed roots of a fallen oak, according to dispatch tapes and a law-enforcement account given to The Tampa Tribune. Catching his pursuers by surprise, Freeland shot and killed the police dog, then quickly pumped Williams full of bullets, one of which penetrated his spine. Freeland then shot Williams twice more in the head at point-blank range.

Speirs moved toward the gunfire. “I’m coming to you,” he told Williams over the radio, according to the Tampa Tribune report. Then Freeland appeared over a ridge and fired at him. Though Speirs managed to shoot back, he was wounded in the leg during the exchange. “I’ve been hit, too,” he told the dispatcher. Now authorities mounted a massive manhunt, including 500 officers, every available police dog, a SWAT tank and a helicopter. They soon found Williams dead, and his gun and ammunition missing. For the rest of the day and overnight, authorities scoured the woods for Freeland. Not until the next morning did a 10-person SWAT team finally corner him. He was hunkered down under another fallen oak, not far from where he’d killed the deputy. When the cops spotted a gun in Freeland’s hand—Williams’s .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol—they opened fire on him. And plenty of it: 110 bullets in all, 68 of which hit him.

That barrage has now sparked a controversy over the amount of force used on Freeland. Did law enforcement overreact because one of their own had been slain? Or was the hail of bullets justified? Though the Polk County Sheriff’s Office, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the local state attorney’s office are reviewing the incident, Freeland’s family members say that’s not enough. They argue that the sheriff’s office can’t credibly scrutinize itself, and they’re calling on Gov. Jeb Bush to order an independent investigation. The family is “not defending what did,” says Jorge Angulo, one of the attorneys representing the family pro bono. “They are asking why he was shot so many times. Why was he not taken alive?” Bush “will not even consider an independent investigation” until the current inquiries conclude, a spokeswoman responds. A sheriff’s spokesman defends how authorities acted, arguing that Freeland “had demonstrated a brutal lack of concern for human life” and that “officers perceived there to be a threat and responded appropriately.”

Others have protested law enforcement’s handling of the situation as well. The Florida Civil Rights Association has called on U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to order an independent investigation by the Justice Department. A Justice spokeswoman said the department was waiting for the results of the state probe before deciding whether to conduct their own. Race may have been a factor, the FCRA argues; Freeland was black, while most of the officers were white. “The police tactics and the force used in the manhunt of a black man … is profoundly disturbing and raises questions that are too important to be dismissed,” says J. Willie David III, FCRA’s president. The group is especially critical of certain comments made by Polk County authorities in the aftermath of Freeland’s death. “I suspect the only reason 110 rounds was all that was fired was that’s all the ammunition they had,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd told the Associated Press. The civil rights group cites the case of Amadou Diallo, a black man killed in New York in 1999 in a hail of 41 bullets. That case drew national attention and provoked widespread condemnation of the officers involved. Freeland’s story, on the other hand, has remained mostly a local matter and hasn’t sparked nearly as much outcry. But of course, Diallo didn’t kill one deputy and maim another.

The black community in Polk County has occasionally filed complaints about racial profiling and excessive force in the past. But those incidents were not nearly as extreme, says Don Brown, president of the Lakeland branch of the NAACP, who met with a sheriff’s representative after the shooting. “I’m still looking into the case,” says Brown. But “on the surface, it doesn’t look right … It does look like it was an excessive amount of bullets.”

More at link above.

[High Plains]

1. Nuthin' like a good, old-fashioned summary execution.

[TheCowsCameHome]

2. That is one bad case of suicide, I'll tell ya.

WTF is with Florida lately?

[951-Riverside]

3. Seems fair enough

He was going to be executed anyway, by doing it this way they saved the taxpayers and the general public money and time trying this nice fellow.

[Malikshah]

5. Yeah...they should have first flayed him alive though...don't you

think...he was going to be executed and all anyway.

Then they could have danced all over his corpse and drawn cop-killer on the street with his blood.

Yup. Sounds fair enough.

It's called excessive and shows a tremendous lack of discipline on the cops' part.

[Occulus]

9. Yeah, who the fuck cares about a trial or jury of peers

It's not like anyone has a right to those things...

(psst- you should be ASHAMED of yourself)

[951-Riverside]

10. If he was still armed and refused to give up he waved that right

His death was quick and after once a bullet pieced his brain very painless, for him the whole ordeal ended very well.

[Jack from Charlotte]

12. Perhaps the tax payers should be reimbursed for the cost of.....

about 50 some bullets. Seems like perhaps that might have been a waste of tax dollars. Otherwise...

The term........... OVERkill comes to mind when I read this.

[951-Riverside]

13. $15 for a box of bullets is a damn good deal

compared to spending millions taking this nice, mild mannered fellow to trial and executing him. While I am not advocating on the spot executions which IS NOT what happened here, I think the whole ordeal ended very well for him and the tax payers.

[cboy4]

4. Keep in mind most SWAT officers carry MP5 sub-machine guns

which fire off tremendous bursts of bullets with the single pull of the trigger.

MP5:

So, it's not like they're each pulling the trigger over and over again.

That many officers can spray that many bullets in a matter of a few seconds.

All I would say is do some research before condemning what these officers did: considering the type of firepower they were armed with, how they're trained, and the situation they were involved with trying to hunt down a cop killer.

I do have some experience in this field.

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

6. An awful lot of them don't have...

Full rock and roll on their fire selector, just 3-shot burst. Why? To keep a stressed officer from emptying the clip in one burst. Bad juju, that. It can get an officer killed, if he has to reload at the wrong time.

Any way you slice it, 110 rounds expended with 63 hits counted, is indicative of poor training, poor discipline and poor police work.

I posit that there are a lot of good and experienced police firearms instructors shaking their heads over this shoot, for a lot of good reasons.

[cboy4]

8. Well I have no idea how well they've been trained, but it's well

documented that an officer's pin point accuracy is affected sometimes dramatically during stressful situations.

That's academy range information 101.

That's why it's ridiculous for people to ever argue, "why didn't they just shoot him in the leg or arm?" (especially when referring to a patrol officer who's armed generally with only a semi-automatic with a very limited number of rounds available.

110 rounds were fired by the SWAT team, yet only 63 hits....that's what, a 57 percent "success" rate??!!

Maybe they have been poorly trained....I have no way of knowing.

But the bottom line is none of us were on scene to witness the situation.

I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to SWAT as opposed to a cop and K9 killer....until I know all of the facts, which we don't have.

[DaveJ]

7. The family deserves an explanation.

The family is “not defending what did,” says Jorge Angulo, one of the attorneys representing the family pro bono. “They are asking why he was shot so many times. Why was he not taken alive?”

This is not for the man who was killed, it's for the family. If the police department has the power to kill people they should have the responsibility of giving a complete explanation to the families of the slain. This is about taking responsibility. I do not know how police normally handle these situations but I am a crazy idealist who thinks it is inappropriate to kill someone and just walk away from it without a deep and thoughtful explanation to the family.

[Imagevision]

11. Why did they waste so many bullets??