A couple of days ago, I essayed about Fulda, and a conflict between a Afghan immigrant guy at a German bakery at 4 AM, and the cops.....with the Afghan shot dead. Well....the investigation has gotten into details. My regional public TV network.....HR....laid out the basic story in more detail.
All total....12 shots were fired by the cop involved. Even I will admit that it is a fair sum. Although there is the suggestion of a warning shot or two out of this total.
What the cops say is that four of the rounds hit the guy, and two were enough to make him dead.
In this case, the original arriving cop car.....reacted without the use of a gun, and the Afghan guy, in some fit of rage, had attacked the cop arriving....injuring him to some extent. This all occurred after the 19-year old had provoked some confrontation with the bakery folks arriving at 4 AM. Cops say that the attack on the bakery folks involved stones (perhaps street stones, I am assuming), and that the delivery driver had already been hit on the head by one of the stones.
At this point, a second police car arrived, and this is where shots resulted.
The prosecutor's office? Well...they have to review for charges of homicide (against the cop).
You can figure at least three months will be necessary to go over the evidence....the commentary from the various officers involved....and the scene as described by the bakery folks in the original attack on them. Hundreds of man-hours will go into this, and if they did decide on charges.....then it launches into some court action where hundreds more man-hours will be invested. You wouldn't get to the end of this court episode for at least 18 months. For the cop involved, it's a big mess, and it'll likely be the end of his or her career.
Here's the thing which is a footnote at the bottom of this mess. Someone went around to the local refugee building that housed this guy. They talked to the roommate of the asylum seeker. This guy describes the dead kid as "aggressive and mentally ill". It wasn't a drug-hyped episode. The roommate even says that this bizarre behavior had been going on for weeks.
So you'd think that no one said anything? Well....the roommate says he had gone to the head-guy of the refugee center, and just kinda bluntly said that this guy needed to get 'attention' (like medical help or psychological help). It was obvious here. Reaction by the chief? The journalist say that the chief responded that this was not his problem to handle.
Oddly enough....the cops knew this Afghan kid. There had been confrontations before, and he'd been charged up threats and at least one occasion of assault. At some point, he even made of a threat of death while holding a knife. Yet the cops appear to have done nothing but prepare reports and file paperwork (as required).
I'm simply a guest in Germany and tend to view events in a different light. Whenever this 'open-door' immigration strategy gets brought up (2013 to 2016)....it's obvious that some folks with good intentions and deserving reasons came into Germany. It's also clear that some mentally deranged people saw an opportunity to enter, and the Germans didn't really recognize that they had major issues. It's been the same attitude over TB being reintroduced into society, and realizing that no one made a big deal out of testing people (I'm a visa guy as well, and no one has ever bothered testing me for TB, or my mental state of mind). Course, no German Auslander office folks have bothered to test my mental side and determine if I'm safe or not.
The prosecutor may reach some point where he thinks 12 shots were excessive, perhaps even suggesting one single warning shot, and one single body shot. But then....he wasn't standing there or watching some advancing mentally deranged guy. The lack of attention by the refugee center 'boss'? Perhaps he's right....it's not his job. The lack of attention by the cops on a guy who'd made a threat to kill? Maybe it's not their job, except to write up reports, and file them. So you end up with a thousand to two-thousand man-hours spent on an after-action episode....because no one really wanted to preserve the peace or lock up the mentally deranged guy who appeared dangerous....over and over. For all these folks, it wasn't their job.
Who do you blame in the end? If you walked into a police station in Germany and brought up this scenario.....cops would be sitting there and likely shaking their heads. Something is wrong here but you can't seem to find anyone to blame. Someone ought to be fired, but that won't happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment