Erica's tea party in T minus 12 minutes!

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Cops Respond to Hostage Situation by Killing the Hostage...but is that the whole story?

No, that headline is absolutely not the whole story.

I'm not a person who blindly defends the police. I lean pretty consistently in the opposite direction. If anything, my usual response is to see police officers accused of wrongdoing as guilty until proven innocent. This is because most of the time they are the ones who have the power in interactions with the public - and I make a point of being on the side of those without power.

I can rant and rave for hours about police abuses. This situation just isn't what it's being made out to be.

Basically police were called because a violent felon named Guillermo Perez had stabbed his ex girlfriend. So, this wasn't a case of cops walking into an otherwise peaceful situation all large and in charge and escalating things into a clusterfuck. Nope. The cops walked into a situation they knew was already a dangerous clusterfuck.

Once the cops were there, it got worse, with Perez grabbing a bystander and starting to cut her throat. Her name was Elizabeth Tollison. (Note: you can die from having your throat cut. Duh.) So they fired at Perez in an effort to save his latest victim.

Unfortunately, this isn't the movies, and they also shot Tollison.Now, let's pause for a minute. Police officers go through a lot of firearms training. There are certain levels of shooting proficiency required to be a cop. But no matter how good a person is at the gun range, in a situation like what this post is about...well, it's just not the same.

Imagine having to draw and fire a gun in a split second, in the middle of the aforementioned clusterfuck, knowing that you are going to have to kill a person who is right in the middle of killing someone else. Nobody is standing still, people are screaming, a person's throat is being cut - and your job is to save that person. So you draw your gun and shoot - while your heart is pounding, while all these things are going through your mind. Could you do any better? I'm asking seriously.

I completely understand that cops are supposed to have training for situations like this. But in most cases they don't get the type of training that would make it possible for them to instantly go all Navy SEAL and put a perfect double tap into the middle of the attacker's forehead.

That's as it should be. Militarized cops are bad for society, and cause more harm than they could ever prevent. First and foremost cops are supposed to be part of the community they serve. They are working people like the rest of us. (I'm sure I'm going to get called a bad anarchist for this, since police departments are generally used as tools of capitalism - to defend the status quo. On a macro level, I agree. But that's not what I'm talking about right now.)

A crazed, dangerous, murderous degenerate stabbed his ex girlfriend.  Then, seeing there was no way for him to escape, he made the decision to grab Elizabeth Tollison and try to  kill her too.In less time that it takes you to read this sentence, the 3 cops tried to save her. They failed. It's a tragedy.

There's plenty of blame to go around for her death. Our joke of a justice system that causes peaceful people to rot in prison for a plant while violent dangerous evil criminals walk around free deserves a good bit of the blame. So does society, which produces people like this.

Most of the blame is squarely on Perez, though. He chose to cut Elizabeth Tollison's throat. He tried to end another human being's life.I can't begin to put myself in Elizabeth Tollison's shoes that day.

But I think I would hope that someone would try to save me. And I don't think I'd want the people who tried to save me to be publicly excoriated for it. At least, I hope not.

Look what I had to do with my escape artists...this is Pinky, who at least has the decency to look sheepish.

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The Baez Family has another driver!!!!!!!!!

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