This morning’s Coeur d’Alene Press is reporting that the Coeur d’Alene City Council agreed to an $80,000 out-of-court settlement with Craig Jones, the owner of Arfee, the dog shot and killed by a Coeur d’Alene police officer in July 2014.
The article included quotes from Coeur d’Alene Mayor Steve Widmyer who called the shooting “a mistake” and from Councilman Woody McEvers who seemed to conclude that money payoffs resolve everything. Many of the online article’s commenters called for Officer Kelley to be fired. None of them looked beyond the money settlement and asked if their solutions really solved the underlying problem.
As we suggested in our post entitled Careless Composition or Intentional Deception? on July 11 just two days after the shooting, “… the examination of this incident must not be limited to the conduct of the officer who fired the shot. We think it needs to go further to understand what in the officer’s mindset, supervision, and training led him to behave as he did in this incident.”
In our post on July 21, 2014, entitled Don’t Start Construction Yet…, we suggested:
The officer who fired the shot did not act in a vacuum. The action he took on July 9 was a function of the training and supervision he had received up to the moment he pulled the trigger. To the extent his actions were provably contrary to that training and supervision and departmental policies and practices, he was culpable. However, to the extent his actions were a function of incomplete and conflicting training and supervision as well as unclear or imprecise policies and practices, his culpability is shared equally by several above him including his field supervisor and watch commander, the department’s training officer, the department’s command staff, the chief, the Mayor and City Council, and the Idaho Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training.
Since then, Coeur d’Alene has hired a new police chief, Lee White. We hope that Chief White has begun to take the steps necessary to fix the real problem as we see it. When both line and staff police officers engage in a series of entirely inappropriate actions as happened in the Arfee shooting, one line officer’s action involving lethal force (or as Widmyer dismissed it, “a mistake”) should lead to corrective actions well up the police department’s institutional food chain.
So we ask: As a result of the lessons learned from the Arfee shooting, what has changed in the way Coeur d’Alene, Idaho’s police officers are selected, trained, and supervised?
Today, 2 days later, we read another account of CDA Police excessive use of force in the arrest of a fellow named Barnhouse because of his attempt to get his wallet out of his back pocket in order to produce his ID. He ends up with ten grand from city taxpayers and a settlement, which required public apology from the Mayor, in a civil rights suit.
Didn’t I read somewhere in the Arfie settlement where the final word was “We hope to learn from our mistakes and move forward”, which they always say but never learn.
Comment by Gary Ingram — March 20, 2015 @ 10:38 am
At one time, I gave thought to becoming a cop but a cop friend of mine that knew my temperament pointed out that I would be like the cops in the Barnhouse and arfee story are portrayed and that would be bad for everyone. He didn’t think I would get passed a very stringent psych test that dept. had, he was most likely right so where is the weeding process here?
The only people that really know what happened with arfee are the cops the only people that know the Barnhouse story are Mr. and Mrs. Barnhouse and the cops, but since the city settled it looks like Mr. Barnhouse story holds water which really puts the hiring, training and retention policies of CDA Police in question. Considering this trait of an apparent lack CDA policies in general is continuing one does wonder when lip service stops and real change begins?
Comment by Mike Teague — March 20, 2015 @ 11:56 am
Gary and Mike,
My OpenCdA post entitled We Shouldn’t Be Surprised… in September 2014 included this:
Also, I believe that the Barnhouse incident was partially captured on either a bodycamera or a dashcamera.
Comment by Bill — March 20, 2015 @ 1:56 pm
Seems like the standard is shoot and ask questions later… If the person survives.
Those that follow national news (not in the mainstream, corporate media) see these types of stories nearly every DAY around the rest of the U.S. It’s not just in North Idaho. That’s the scary part.
Comment by JSmetal — April 9, 2015 @ 7:33 am