I get accused of sticking up for cops no matter what. So let us do this one.
What happened
August 6, 9:10 a.m., 3500 block of Sunnyvale Street in Dallas. 39-year-old Renard McFadden rolled up in a stolen Ford F-150 and walked to a white Porsche Cayenne parked outside a business. A 9-year-old girl was sitting inside waiting on her mother.
He threatened the child while indicating he was armed and ordered her out. She ran in to get her mom. When the mother came out, he indicated he was armed again, took the Porsche, and left.
The mother’s tracking app did the rest. At 10:10 a.m. officers located the Porsche on the 5800 block of Williamstown Road. Uniformed Dallas Police Department units set up a felony stop. A covert officer put his unmarked car in front of the Porsche to block it from leaving, then got out with his handgun drawn and moved toward a residential yard for cover.
A uniformed Dallas officer fired four rounds toward the covert officer and the suspect.
Another officer yelled “blue, blue” from a distance. The firing stopped. McFadden got out and surrendered without further incident.
Nobody was hit. Not the officers, not the suspect, not the public. A loaded handgun was recovered inside the stolen Porsche. McFadden was charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, robbery, unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, and unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon.
Everything about that stop was announced
This is what makes it indefensible.
The covert officer put it out over the radio before he moved — he called out that he was going in front of the suspect vehicle to block it from leaving. Everyone on that channel knew where he was going and what he was about to do.
The covert car is directly in front of the suspect vehicle. The shooting officer is looking right at it. The second unmarked unit peels off exactly the way it is supposed to, so the marked car can take point on the stop — which means the shooting officer knew which units were unmarked, because he watched one of them clear out of his way.
Every piece of that stop was called out loud before a shot was fired.
The covert officer did nothing wrong
Some people will want to blame him for getting out. That is backwards.
Sitting inside a car directly behind a felony-stop suspect vehicle is sitting in a kill zone. If that suspect comes out shooting, how many rounds are going into that space? Fifteen? Twenty? Does glass stop any of them? No. You cannot stay in the car. Getting out and moving to cover is the correct answer and it is not close.
He did his job. The dashcam that captured all this has worse visibility than a human being standing outside a vehicle — and the officer who fired was outside his car, with a clear line of sight to the left.
Target identification is the floor
This is not an advanced skill. It is not a specialty course. It is the most basic requirement that exists for carrying a firearm in public: know what is in front of your muzzle before you press the trigger.
Four rounds went downrange at a police officer because somebody skipped it. Not because the scene was chaotic — it was announced. Not because visibility was bad — he had the best angle on that street. Because he did not confirm.
The only reason we are writing about a near miss instead of a funeral is luck. Luck is not a tactic.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
Hiring and training standards have slipped in a lot of agencies over the last five years. Anyone who spent time as a training officer will tell you the same thing: not everyone who is a cop should be a cop.
Saying that is not an attack on police. It is the opposite. The officers who do this job right are the ones who pay for it when somebody who cannot identify a target ends up on their felony stop.
