Damn I'm such a G, it's pathetic.

Citizens:

Whenever there's a police shooting I often get annoyed by the police entity's handling of the press. In  withholding information, anyone with an iota of critical thinking can go from being sympathetic to those who are sworn to protect us to being skeptical of what really happened during the discharge of a cop's firearm.

The tragic shooting of Ralph Painter, Rainier, Oregon's police chief involved a 21 year old man. Police told the press that the shooter appeared to be high on meth but will not state anything about where the shooter obtained the gun. Presumably, and from witness reports, the shooter grabbed the gun from the police chief before shooting him. When asked about this, police would not confirm the accuracy of this theory.

Why not?

Although it appears a clear case of an asshole shooting a good cop, I'd feel better if the information released wasn't so one sided. Citizens don't have press offices with which to spin their side of the story. They don't have the option to wait days before explaining discharging a firearm. Whats to keep the police from speculating that any citizen involved in anything was on drugs? Or worse, what's to keep them from telling the press that a citizen "may have been high on drugs." As I type this, I "may" be drunk and high on cocaine, weed, and some crazy shit that I invented in my basement. I'm not (primarily, because I don't have a basement). But in a police culture of shoot-then-ask-questions, there's also a culture of "talk shit about a citizen and then retract later."

Over New Years Eve, a shooting occurred a club. Police responded and one cop fired his gun. At whom? Why? No reason given. It just happened. From the Oregonian:

"He didn't shoot the victim, in the course of what he came upon and what he saw going on, he discharged his weapon," Sheffer said. "There was no one person attached to the incident."

Sheffer could not go into any additional detail about the officer's involvement in the incident and would not confirm later why the officer fired his gun or whom he was targeting citing the ongoing investigation.

"We can't clarify anymore (other than) this is an officer involved shooting but this is not an officer involved shooting in which someone was struck," she said.

 Four days after the incident, the officer had yet to be interviewed regarding the shooting. All the police will do is take the sentence "an officer shot his gun" and stretch it into a just-as-vague paragraph.

I don't envy the dangerous nature of police work and have a lot of respect for the job they do. I just think that the press handling of officer involved events undermine their efforts by bringing a level of skepticism among the literate public. In 2010 when an officer shot a deranged homeless guy holding a weapon, Portland's then police chief Rosie Sizer was so evasive in her description of the homeless guy's weapon that I had to google the "clues" she would slowly release to determine that the officer involved shot a deranged man holding an exacto/pen/hobby knife. Her reluctance to state what the deceased suspect was holding made me think that they didn't fully believe it was a justified kill.

Clearly I'm not in a mood to spellcheck or capitalize. Makes me not want to post it. Hey, wait... Maybe I didn't write this at all. In fact, all I'll say is that paragraphs were written. I can't clarify any more that this was a Gallucci involved writing and not one in which anything was said. I blame my netbook.