Why Waco PD’s Version of Events at the COC&I Meeting Is Bulls**t

OFF THE WIRE
Why Waco PD’s Version of Events at the COC&I Meeting Is Bulls**t

1.
The statements made by the Waco PD PIO (Public Information Officer) were self-serving from the beginning. Instead of limiting his commentary to factual information and leaving the editorializing to the media, he attempted to control the narrative from the get-go, congratulating his fellow officers on their “quick response” and “immediate yet appropriate action” which “saved lives.” I’ll leave it to the reader to speculate as to what his motivation might have been for spinning it the way he did.

2.
The Waco PD PIO provided the media with a detailed account of events inside the Twin Peaks restaurant when there was no way the police could have known what had happened. Less than three hours after the shooting, the Waco PD PIO provided a detailed description of the fistfight-turned-knife-fight-turned-gunfight as it moved from the bathroom, through the restaurant and outside patio, and finally into the parking lot. There is no way that enough physical evidence had been collected and analyzed and enough witnesses interviewed at that point for the police to say with any confidence what exactly had happened. Still, the PIO’s description of events was explicit in its detail. Surveillance footage from the interior cameras at Twin Peaks shared with the Associated Press contradicts the PIO’s description of what happened.

3.
The Waco PD PIO admitted that there were twenty-two law enforcement officers, including ten Waco PD SWAT team members, staged outside the Twin Peaks but stated that no undercover or plain-clothed officers were inside the restaurant. This is a ridiculous claim. Anyone who knows anything about police operations knows that when a tactical team sets up on a target location one of their first priorities is to get eyes and ears inside. They have all kinds of nifty electronic toys with which to accomplish this in situations where physically placing an officer inside the location is not feasible such as a hostage situation or a barricaded subject. In this case, however, the location was a public restaurant that was open for business. Getting “eyes and ears” inside this location would have involved nothing more than sending a couple of cops with beards to the Harley dealership down the highway for some dealer tees and chain wallets and then having them walk into the Twin Peaks and sit down. This was an open COC&I meeting. No one would have batted an eye. The police’s claim that twenty-two cops with credible intel that a violent confrontation was about to occur in a public place sat outside effectively blind and deaf is laughable. If it actually happened that way it is the worst police work in the history of the world.

4.
Nine dead, eighteen wounded, all bikers. Not one restaurant patron, restaurant employee, or police officer suffered so much as a scratch. No stray bullets struck nearby buildings. These facts simply do not support the police version of events: that two rival motorcycle clubs engaged in a running gun battle through a crowded restaurant on a Sunday afternoon after church ultimately turning their guns on police as the gunfight spilled into the parking lot. Rather these facts are evidence of precision gunfire from expert marksmen, the kind you would expect to find on the Waco PD SWAT team. This was an ambush and a massacre.

The police are sick and tired of the bad press they’re getting out of Ferguson, Missouri, NYC, and Baltimore, MD. They’re sick and tired of public push-back and ungrateful citizens asserting their Constitutional rights. Call me crazy if you want to but if you wanted to manufacture an incident that would capture national media attention, demonstrate to the public that, without the heroic efforts of heavily armed law enforcement, we would all be living in a Mad Max movie, and most importantly, where no more black people would get shot, you couldn’t have planned it any better.