Officer fatally shot during traffic stop in Memphis; killer on the run

A simple traffic stop should never lead to something like this:

A manhunt is underway for a suspect who fatally shot a police officer during a traffic stop in Tennessee, authorities said Sunday.

Memphis Police Officer Sean Bolton, 33, was shot multiple times Saturday night by a person who was in the car he pulled over, police said.

The assailant remains at large, Memphis police spokeswoman Karen Rudolph said.

A civilian used the officer's radio to notify police about the shooting, she said.

Bolton, who joined the force in October 2010, was taken to hospital in critical condition. He later died.

This is the third time a Memphis police officer has been killed in the past four years, Memphis Police Director Toney Armstrong said.

Police officer killed during traffic stop in Memphis - CNN.com

 

Probably another one of those sovereign nation nuts.

 

Probably not:

Sean Bolton died from multiple gunshot wounds after he was shot just after 9:15 p.m. while conducting a traffic stop at Cottonwood and Perkins in Parkway Village Saturday night.

Memphis police officer shot during traffic stop - The Commercial Appeal


Parkway Village is a predominantly African-American community in southeast Memphis, Tennessee. Parkway Village is bounded by Getwell Road and Lamar Avenue on the West, Winchester Road on the South, I-240 on the North, and Mendenhall Road on the East. The former Mall of Memphis was in the Parkway Village community.

In 1956, developers began to develop the farmland that is now Parkway Village for "gracious suburban living". Parkway Village remained a quiet community with little crime and well kept neighborhoods throughout most of the 1980s. In the late 1980s the area became a neighborhood in transition and the crime rate began to rise.

Parkway Village is in the 38118 zip code. The population is primarily African-American, younger, and mostly single. The average home value, ($68,900) is lower than in the Memphis metro area as a whole.

Parkway Village, Memphis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

While not the nicest part of Memphis, it is far from the worse.

The mall there, since closed, was a huge regional draw as it also had an ice skating rink inside it.

Also, since Memphis is roughly two thirds black, just about every neighborhood could be described as "primarily African American."

 

So, you think the odds that it was a "sovereign national nut" are good then?

 

Of the four previous cop killings in Memphis, I believe two were sovereign citizen types.

But I'll let the reporting run its course before I latch onto a narrative (tm) that is supported by whatever you can google and copy and paste from Wikipedia.

 

I hope we one day live in a society in which African Americans, too, get arrested and charged with murder for killing cops, and that justice doesn't just go the other way around.

 

Memphis is a shithole.

That is all there is to this.

 

Looks like they got the suspect cornered, although police won't confirm if the standoff is related to the shooting.

Memphis police plead with suspect to surrender in standoff at Parkway Village apartments - The Commercial Appeal

 

The fact that police officers know that any contact they have with anyone might end with their being shot is a significant factor in how quick they are to shoot other people. They want to go home alive when their shift is over. This is not a job stress factor for most of us. That's not an excuse for shooting unarmed civilians, but it has to be considered part of the problem.

 

Was this driver successful in closing the door?

 

The immediate presumption that a shooting of a cop is because he pulled a sovereign citizen - and the misconceptions about sovereign citizens - is frustrating to see repeated each time one of these instances happens.

As I've pointed out previously - the overwhelming majority of these shootings occur when a cop pulls over someone who knows that there is a high likelihood the traffic stop is going to end with the person going to jail for a long time. That could be because they have an outstanding warrant for a serious crime or because they are carrying evidence of a serious crime. They are taking advantage of that momentary information imbalance to get the upper hand.

The odds of it being a sovereign citizen who is so angry at the government they are willing to kill is extremely low, although certainly possible.

The overwhelming majority of sovereign citizen stops do not end violently. The main proponents of the ideology do not endorse violence. There's a belief that if they mumble the right admiralty law/gold fringed flag/traveler on the land mumbo jumbo that the officer/prosecutor/judge will suddenly see the error of his ways and let them off scot-free.

It is a tiny minority within the movement that is dangerously violent.

A significant portion of sovereign citizen adherents are African-American. Just Google "Moorish Nation" if you don't believe me.