Wednesday, June 08, 2005

critics these days

In Des Moines a cop walks out of the courthouse and sees a man spray-painting "Police Academy 7" on the side of a white pickup truck. He calls for backup and 15 officers rush to the scene and attempt to surround the man, who then turns the spraypaint on them... so they shoot him. There are numerous realities floating around this story; in one of them the man pulled a replica handgun from his pants and was shot dead, in others he simply reached into his pocket and nobody knows how he's doing. The police department is understandably not saying a thing pending their investigation into the real-life similarities between their cops and those portrayed in the Police Academy movies.

UPDATE: it was his own truck, it was a toy gun, and he's dead. They say he "had a history of mental health problems and was wanted on a mental health warrant". Presumably the mental health problems were what made him think that standing in front of the courthouse spray-painting a truck with a toy gun tucked in his waistband was a low-profile place to hide from the law. I just have this picture in my head of 16 cops standing around a dead guy on the sidewalk, spray can inches from where it rolled out of his hand, and one of them says "god damn it... now we gotta do paperwork".