SE Hoya Containment Thread (aka Politics)

On the morning of Nov. 12, 2023, two officers from the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office responded to a call in a residential neighborhood. A woman named Celestiana Lopez had called 911 and said that her boyfriend, Marquis Jackson, was refusing to return her car after borrowing it, and had also been sending her threatening text messages. Four officers, including Sergeant Beth Roberts and Deputy Jesse Hernandez, responded to the call. While Roberts was speaking with Lopez, Jackson arrived on at the scene on foot. Hernandez kept Jackson away from Lopez and patted him down. A few minutes later, Roberts instructed the other officers to detain Jackson, so he was handcuffed, given a more thorough pat down, and put in the back seat of Hernandez's car. The two other responding officers left to look for Lopez's vehicle, and after a few minutes Hernandez left Roberts in order to perform yet another personal search of Jackson. What happened next was captured on Hernandez's body camera:

As Hernandez approaches his car's door, an acorn falls from a nearby tree and lands on the roof of the car. Hernandez immediately screams, "Shots fired!" several times, executes a double roll into the street, draws his gun, rises to one knee and fires several shots into the back of the car, falls onto his side and yells, "I'm hit!" while emptying the rest of his clip into the car, and then stumbles across the street to find cover. Roberts, who also fired shots into the police car, asks Hernandez if he is OK. "I'm good. I feel weird, but I'm good," he says. Jackson was not struck by any of the bullets.

The acorn detail was later confirmed by an internal affairs investigation that produced a 44-page report on the incident. Investigators went through the footage from Hernandez's body camera frame by frame, and discovered the acorn striking the roof of his car at the precise moment that he began screaming as if he'd been shot and rolling into the street.

The entire report is as fascinating as it is maddening. At some moments the investigators seem to be having trouble concealing their disdain for Hernandez and Roberts; at one point one of them asks Hernandez why he performed a double roll into the street. (The response: “Uh, the rolling. Um, kind of reaction to what's going on and me realizing like my legs are not working the way I need them to work right now, but I can, I can roll to that vehicle over there. So, that's kind of where I was trying to get to.”) And then there are moments that reiterate just how close every cop seems to be to tipping over into a murderous panic. Hernandez repeatedly told the investigators that he felt something hit his torso when the acorn landed on the car's roof, and that his legs immediately went numb. Roberts emphasized the "terror" that she heard in her partner's voice, and how his stumbling into the street gave her the impression that he was dying. Hernandez, like all of those cops who have been filmed losing control of their limbs at the mere site of a white powder, seems to have had something like a panic attack—in response to the sound of an acorn striking a vehicle—and his response to that sensation was to imagine he'd been shot, throw himself on the ground, and spray bullets at a man who was handcuffed in the back of his car.

The more sickening parts of the report have to do with the excuse Roberts and Hernandez concocted for themselves. Here you can sense the echoes of a panicked, post-shooting confabulation. Roberts told the investigators that she thought she saw a silencer in one of the photos that Jackson had texted to Lopez, and that Lopez had said that Jackson was known to carry a gun. Roberts had mentioned this photo to Hernandez before he started walking toward the car. In the reality Roberts and Hernandez tried to construct while speaking to investigators, the existence of this photo gave Hernandez reason to believe that the sound of an acorn hitting the top of his car was the sound of a silenced weapon being fired at him from inside the car by a man who was handcuffed and had already been searched twice.

What's striking is how easily Roberts and Hernandez were able to continue living in that reality even as they spoke to investigators. “I've been advised by, um, my attorney here, I, you know, I know they didn't recover a weapon, or anything like that on the scene, but, um, I'm confident with what I just told you is what, what happened,” said Hernandez.

When asked to explain her decision to fire into the police car, Roberts responded from within that false reality, unable to spare even one qualifier: “The threat was somebody had shot him. We had an armed subject in the back of the vehicle. Jesse was shot. I'm watching him, you know, fumble on the roadway. How do I, how do I give him more time? How do I, how do I draw the attention to me? How do I, how do I save him?”

“The only wars we won were ****ing ones where we were the most brutal mother****ers on the planet,” the right-wing country rocker said. “I don’t disagree with what Israel is doing.”

“It’s like, they should just go in there and be like, ‘You know what? We want our hostages back. If we don’t have them back, clock starts now. And in ****ing 24 hours, we’re going to start bombing mother****ers and killing ****ing civilians, 30, 40,000 a ****ing time,’” he continued. ”‘So you civilians better ****ing pack up and ****ing get these ****ing mother****ers. And you go against Hamas. You ****ing go against them. We’re not playing ****ing games with you.’ That’s the only thing people understand.”

Rogan, an accused peddler of conspiracy theories and misinformation, summoned enough sense to push back, telling Rock later in the interview: “You’re not supposed to pick civilian targets. It’s a war crime.”