Negligence Not An Accident
Florida woman accidentally killed in police academy exercise: “Mary Knowlton, 73, was participating in a role-playing exercise when an officer mistakenly shot her with a live round, the Punta Gorda Police Department said.”
The officer probably changed the magazine in his weapon and neglected to clear the live round he had chambered. Even if you are firing blanks, you do not aim at a live target. The wad in a blank round can injure or kill.
This wasn’t an accident, the Punta Gorda Police Department was negligent and a woman died.
2 comments
Yeah, Jim Wright was practically apoplectic about this one, because he *taught* this kind of course before, and so many rules were broken as to go far past the realm of “accident” right into negligence. For one thing, there wasn’t supposed to be a real gun anywhere in sight. This kind of exercise is *always* done with dummy guns. Always. If a real gun is used, it’s cleared by *multiple* people, but standard protocol is the orange rubber guns. Thus negligent homicide. Not that it’ll happen. The boys in blue protect their own…
We didn’t use orange rubber guns in my academy, we used ‘retired’ service weapons with the firing pins removed and the handles painted red. I ‘starred’ in a number of ‘Shoot/Don’t Shoot’ episodes and we used blanks in the films, but you had a clear view of where the wad was going.
Everyone involved had to clear & check in their weapons before they entered the set and woe betide anyone who forgot about their ankle holster or the tiny auto loader in their back pocket.
As my old firearms instructor at the academy said – you should never get used to carrying a firearm.