[UPDATED] The NH Union Leader has the NH AG’s full statement regarding this matter, determining there was no wrongdoing involved. I’m glad of that. But I stand by the points I raised in the post. As a commenter at the UL site wrote,
I don’t think anybody expected this to be a criminal matter. Negligence? A judgment call. It’s not surprising that it went the way it did.
But didn’t these guys go a bit overboard in thinking that they could use private property for their training exercise without getting permission from the owner? The Constitution is pretty clear about this.
– Bruce, New London
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The story about the cop shooting in Concord has been simmering just below the radar since word first came out. Here’s how I view this, being an ordinary citizen exposed to the available media…
First, I heard on NewsNine that a cop got shot during the night in a bank by another cop, but his bulletproof vest saved him.
The next day, reading the Union Leader newspaper, I learned it was accidental.
"This is not a case where a police officer discharged their weapon in pursuit of a suspect or in the midst of an arrest or something like that," Strelzin said.
Four Concord police officers were inside the building when one officer’s handgun discharged, striking a fellow officer in the chest. Strelzin would not say why the officers were in the building.
"I can tell you the only individuals involved were those four officers," he said. Their names are being withheld while the investigation continues.
At this point, I thought, well, what exactly were they doing? Maybe something like this…
At work, tongues flapped about a cop "accidently" shooting another cop. Everyone was asking the same question I had intially thought– "How does that happen?" Someone mentioned this guy:
He was only half-joking. So it went. What were they doing at 4:30 in the morning in an unfinished bank?
Another morning, and I’m getting dressed for the day, watching NewsNine again… On comes a report with an interview with some guy that either owns or is running the project at the building the cops were in during the "mishap." He says he has no clue what the cops were doing in the building, that nothing appeared amiss. The reporter notes the Concord police still aren’t saying what happened. Hmmm. You can imagine the watercooler discussion THAT day, as almost everyone I work with saw the report.
And then nothing for a few days. The conspiracists among our bunch began to surmise a coverup was in the works. The local rumor mill coughed up a story that perhaps something really bad was going down. "One thing’s for sure," one local wag said, "We’ll never find out what really happened." And everyone agreed, even those of us not so prone to believing wild conspiracy tales.
Well, nearly a week has gone by, and finally, we find out some of the "facts." Guess what? It was simply a training mission accident the whole time! As reported by the Concord Monitor,
The four Concord police officers involved in an accidental shooting inside the Granite State Credit Union on May 1 were conducting a training exercise, a law enforcement source said last night.
The officers had unloaded their weapons before they trained, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. After they finished training, they reloaded their guns. As the officers were leaving the credit union, one of them asked a question about a particular police maneuver, the source said.
At that point, Sgt. Steve Smagula demonstrated the move in question. When he did, his gun discharged, and he shot Officer Joshua Levasseur in the chest.
Man, don’t you just hate it when that happens? The story continues and reveals that the injury was first treated at the police station, prior to a decision to go to the hospital. Is this standard procedure when an officer gets injured? If it is, is doesn’t seem right to me– but who am I?
Then there’s this:
It was not clear yesterday whether anyone in the police department had sanctioned the training inside the credit union or whether the department requires sergeants to seek permission for training in advance. The department’s policies regarding training were not immediately available yesterday afternoon but are expected to be available in the coming days.
Probably one of those spontaneous kind of training missions that always seem to happen sometimes… You know, the kind where you use a private building and don’t tell it’s owner. Yeah– that’s it!
Whatever the final story report indicates, we’ll know the truth once and for all, right?