I was sitting at an oil change place the other day, and a police car pulled up the next bay over. We were both sitting outside the garage doors, waiting to pull in.
I then heard what sounded like a gunshot. I was not particularly antsy, so I didn’t really jump. It felt safe to me. I thought maybe a line had blown, or even a tire, since one of the guys was inflating tires, but nothing. I couldn’t see anything. The sound seemed to have come from a place about ten feet in front of the cop car.
I looked over at the cop and decided instantly I didn’t like him. I meet a lot of people in a typical week, and usually am able to form a reasonably accurate impression in a split second. Sometimes I am wrong; and usually if I am wrong, it is because I was too harsh on someone, who turns out to be smarter and better than I supposed. But most of the time I’m in the neighborhood. Sometimes I will talk myself out of my initial impression, only to be talked back into it by circumstances.
Later I heard one of the guys speculating that it might have been a bottle rocket, so apparently they didn’t know what it was either.
Here is an idea which has likely not occurred to you, and just occurred to me: if a police car could project something sounding like a shot, they could justify shooting back. I have watched a lot of these police videos where they wind up shooting the suspect. Most of the time when you hear the actual shot, the body cam is pointing anywhere but straight. So you would hear a shot, and the officer could claim they were fired at.
I don’t have any particular axe to grind on this. By and large I am a supporter of law enforcement. They frustrate me when they circle the wagons around cops they KNOW are bad cops, but most of the time the events that get politicized, like happened in Minneapolis, are just bad luck and usually stem mainly from a long series of lies told by the media and repeated by politicians.
But what did I witness? Was that cop just playing a practical joke on those guys, using the extraordinarily bad judgement of a psychopath? WAS it a bottle rocket? That seems unlikely, since I know perfectly well what bottle rockets look and sound like. I don’t know. Something happened I can’t explain. It would be easier to just pretend it didn’t happen, but that is the path to imbecility and I don’t want to be a imbecile, if I can help it.
Maybe there is a black market add-on that is invisible unless you know where to look, that certain dirty cops add and their supervisors don’t even know about.
As a general vibe I like the cops around here. But every department has a bad egg or two, people with unresolved trauma, who are hypervigilant and often cruel, and who do their jobs because they like the feeling of power they get, and of the fear and pain they can inflict on the innocent and guilty alike.
I here add this possibility to the stratosphere, to circulate as it will.