I just saw the video of the case where a family dog was shot by the Tennessee Highway Patrol.  They released the video in an attempt to cover their sorry asses in the shooting, but to me it just shows them to be more culpable. 

Part of the reason is that I think the whole concept of a felony stop has major flaws.  Officers demand absolute and blind obedience from the people being stopped and they fail to listen to what those people have to say.  The entire concept of being ordered out of your car and forced at gunpoint to perform acts that are often contradictory or impossible for some people is ananthema to a free people on moral grounds.  More practically, it is very confusing because of the inflexibility of the police and the way those commands are shouted.  I would find it very difficult to get on my knees without using my hands for balance.  The driver in the video had the same difficulty.  However, all the officer cared about was that he keep his hands up.

But what really pisses me off is that the driver repeatedly warned the officer that he had a dog in the car and he didn’t want him to get loose.  From what I could see, the driver even took pains to shut his door to keep the dog in, despite the fact that he was being yelled at by the officer.  If the officers had simply listened to the driver, the incident could have been avoided.

Of course the Tennessee Highway Patrol insists that all procedures were followed and that no one did anything wrong.  I really don’t give a damn if they followed the procedure as if they’d written the damn book.  It is the procedure itself and its inflexibility that are the problems.

I understand that cops often face dangerous people and that they must take precautions to deal with them, and I don’t have any solutions that would help them.  But I do know that the felony stop is yet another example of why people have lost respect for the police.  It is used too frequently and it is too inflexible, allowing no room for individual situations to be taken into account.  Worse, in this case was that it was used against people who had done nothing wrong.  The police simply relied on the word of a single caller to unleash potentially deadly force on an unsuspecting family.

The family is in the process of hiring a lawyer to pursue legal options against the Highway Patrol.  I wish them luck.