Cedar's Take:
Over the last few years I've heard many complaints regarding CMPD tactical training or lack thereof, more accurately.
Even talk of guys getting together at paintball parks to work on team ops and tactics.
So common that the "Cedar Nephew" tells of a swatting call in Steele Creek where every one of the responding Officers was a rook and that he had to instruct each of them how to stack up to make a forced entry.
Thankfully the victim of the swatting call emerged on his own before they could execute the entry. The situation resolved without further excitement or drama.
In that arena I offer this Op-Ed regarding the unfortunate July 29th Greenville training incident.
Keep in mind this Op-Ed is a joint effort by the Post and Courier's editorial board.
(Basically defund never trust the police liberals)
But your thoughtful comments will be formally conveyed to the board later this week.
So what are your thoughts?
From the Post and Courier:
In 2021, cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was fatally shot and director Joel Souza was injured on the set of the movie "Rust" when actor Alec Baldwin picked up a gun, assumed it was loaded with blanks and fired what turned out to be a live round.
It was clear from the start that this was a horrible accident, but then that’s the word we use for a lot of traffic collisions that nonetheless result in criminal charges.
In this case, multiple investigations ensued, by local, state and even federal agencies. Mr. Baldwin was charged with involuntarily manslaughter, the charges were dropped, he was charged again, and this time a judge dismissed the charges because officials had deliberately withheld evidence.
Meantime, an assistant director pleaded no contest to negligent use of a deadly weapon and was sentenced to probation, and the film’s armorer was convicted and sentenced to 18 months in prison for involuntarily manslaughter.
Earlier this month, another accidental shooting occurred when someone fired live rounds that were supposed to be blanks. Only this time it was close to home, and it involved a shooter and supporting cast who are supposed to be trained specifically in how to use weapons properly.
SWAT training is supposed to teach police how to deal with dangerous situations, but it's not supposed to be dangerous, because guns are loaded with blanks. Or at least they're supposed to be.
Fortunately no one died — although one of the two victims shot required surgery and nearly died — when a routine biweekly training session conducted by the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office went horribly awry: A deputy playing the role of a bad guy fired a 12-gauge shotgun that was supposed to be loaded with blanks.
As The Post and Courier’s Seth Taylor reports, a preliminary investigation concluded that multiple breakdowns in safety protocol and ammunition handling led to what we all assume was an accident. Sheriff Hobart Lewis said at a news conference last week that instead of using ammo that was properly marked and stored in the armory, deputies had loaded the weapon with ammo that was stored in an unmarked plastic bag and pulled from a desk drawer; they also failed to properly test the ammo before it was used. That ammo in the bag wasn’t blank but what’s called a breaching round, used to break through windows and doors.
Just let that grotesque carelessness and perhaps laziness sink in.
Now let this sink in: After a week-long, in-house investigation, the sheriff already has declared that no criminal charges will be brought. He is not asking SLED or anyone else to launch an independent investigation — unlike what nearly every law enforcement agency in the state does when one of its officers shoots someone, even when everyone agrees it was an accident.
The sheriff is reviewing the department’s safety protocols and plans to institute changes, but he won’t even seek an outside review of his agency’s policies. Instead, the sheriff said, “We commit to full transparency and to correcting the failures that led to this.”
Clearly, New Mexico has different laws and standards than South Carolina, and the 2021 movie-set shooting was a higher-profile incident, and we all know high-profile incidents get treated differently. But the principles involved are the same: You want to make sure that what everybody believes was an accident really was an accident, and even if it was an accident, you need to consider whether it involved carelessness so serious that it needs to be punished.
None of that is happening here.
We believe the usual route of bringing in SLED to investigate an officer-involved shooting would have been much wiser here — just like we believe state law should require outside investigations whenever police injure or kill innocent or guilty people.
But at this moment, that’s not even our primary concern. Our primary concern is that the Sheriff’s Office could be careless enough to allow two of its deputies to be shot in a routine training exercise. Our concern is that an agency that sends its deputies out there every day with loaded guns to handle dangerous situations is not careful enough to keep them safe when no bad guys are around, when there are supposed to be no real dangers around.
That is grossly unfair to the deputies, and it raises disturbing questions about just how committed the office is to keeping the public safe when its deputies are not in what’s supposed to be a safe environment.
This should be a wake-up call not only for the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office but for every police agency in our state. This should be a moment when every sheriff’s office and police department in South Carolina pauses to do a thorough assessment of its safety protocols, to ensure that they are sufficient to protect our police from careless errors — and to protect the public as well.
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