Florida deputy Jesse Hernandez screamed “shots fired,” and frantically fired his gun after an acorn fell onto the roof of his squad car, making him jump.
If a random loud bang from an acorn falling nearby is enough to get someone to behave like this, they really should not be walking around with a gun. This is completely insane and unhinged behavior.
Fun fact: ‘police officer’ isn’t even in the top 10 most dangerous professions in the US. It’s solidly beat by things like garbage collector, delivery driver, maintenance worker, and pilot. None of those professions typically carry weapons on the job.
Lots of police officers were former bullies with an inferiority complex. Some are wusses who only feel powerful because they’re carrying a deadly weapon.
Another fun fact: police in several other western countries don’t carry deadly weapons and yet are able to do their jobs just fine.
American police are trained to think everything and everyone is against them, through programs like David Grossman’s Killology course. Weird how a program designed to teach recruits to kill without empathy would result in people killing without empathy.
Elsewhere, police are learning de-escalation tactics, but police in the US are learning escalation.
It’s absurd, and leads to scared, trigger-happy morons shooting at acorns.
I want to stress that I am in no-way attempting to excuse this cop, nor am I suggesting that there is any reasonable way to confuse the sound of an acorn with the sound of a gunshot. Even if there were, there is no justification for blindly "returning fire" in the general direction of the noise. That is so batshit crazy a scenario that it is completely irredeemable. This cop needs to be in prison.
That being said, I do want to comment on the capabilities of recording and playback. They completely lack the dynamic range necessary to make any sort of reasonable judgment on the intensity of the "bang". What we hear in the video and what the officer heard in real life are two completely different things.
I have heard black walnuts (golf ball to tennis ball sized outer shell) hitting vehicles at close range. While they certainly can't be reasonably confused with a gunshot, they are startlingly loud.
Again, I want to stress: completely unreasonable that an acorn hitting the cruiser could be confused for a gunshot, and criminally stupid to fire in the general direction of the noise.