Gun Activist Says He Warned PD Involved In Philando Castile Shooting About Shady Traffic Stops
About two years ago, Joe Olson was pulled over by a St. Anthony Police Department squad car for running a red light in Falcon Heights, the same Twin Cities suburb where Philando Castile was shot to death by a cop Wednesday evening. Olson put his hands on the steering wheel and waited for the officer to approach his driver’s side window when he heard a voice emanate from behind his head.
http://linkis.com/thinkprogress.org/ju/Z55b3
“I heard this voice with a tremor of fear in it. Actually, it scared me. Is this a scared cop?” Olson told ThinkProgress. “And he’s standing three feet behind my bumper interviewing me through the outside rear-view mirror, which is really weird, and he sounds terrified. I have a Jeep Grand Cherokee that has tinted windows, so he can’t see in the vehicle very well, he can’t see my hands at all, and he conducts the entire interview through my rear-view mirror.”
Olson said he “could’ve had somebody sitting in the back seat with a rifle” and the cop wouldn’t have been able to tell. He added that the officer’s unusual demeanor “made me afraid, and he was incompetent, and that made me more afraid.”
About six months later, Olson — a retired Minnesota law professor who played a key role in drafting Minnesota’s firearms permit law and now serves as the chairman of the Minnesota Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance — scheduled an appointment with St. Anthony Police Department Chief John Ohl to share his concerns. (The city of Falcon Heights contracts with the St. Anthony PD for police services.) But Olson said Chief Ohl didn’t take him seriously.
“He blew off my report — wasn’t interested,” Olson recalled. “I said, ‘I think you have a training problem, and if you don’t fix it, you’re going to have a bigger problem.'”
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