Police are often placed in situations where they have to make life-or-death decisions in an instant.
Thanks to the attitudes of the establishment media, the results of those consequential choices usually only get publicized if police can be blamed for making the wrong call.
However, now dramatic body cam footage was released where police successfully handled a dangerous situation in which a 4-year-old boy used his father’s gun to open fire on the officers. They were able to disarm the child before anyone got hurt.
Multiple versions of the body cam recordings were shared in a YouTube video. Watch:
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ABC4 in Utah linked highlights from the videos and summarized the events that took place on February 21. The police were summoned when “employees reported that a man brandished a gun in the drive-thru after his order was incorrect.”
Sadaat Johnson, 27, was in the McDonald’s drive-thru with two children in the car, a 4-year-old and a 3-year-old.
Johnson did not comply with police instructions, and the situation escalated until officers were forced to pull Johnson from the vehicle.
The video does not show what happened next in the car. While the police were making the arrest of Johnson, the 4-year-old boy picked up the gun. An officer saw the weapon and shouted “Gun!”
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ABC4 reported, “The officer used his hand to sweep the gun away and the gun went off, hitting the upper part of the McDonald’s building. The officer then yelled at the person inside of the car to drop the gun, and after looking inside the car, realized that it was a small child.”
The children can be heard crying as they exit the car. The officers ask “Are you all right, kid?” and try to reassure them: “It’s okay, it’s okay.”
The discharge may have been accidental. However as reported in the New York Post, “The investigation showed that Johnson then ‘told the child to shoot at the police,’ authorities said. It was not clear exactly when he gave the order and it was not caught in the bodycam clip.”
“The boy — who was taken into protective custody — said he shot at the cops because ‘he wanted his daddy back,’ according to court records obtained by ABC4.”
Johnson also explained to the authorities “this wasn’t the first time his 4-year-old child had gotten his hands on a gun.”
Johnson ended up pleading guilty to two third-degree felonies, child abuse or neglect and aggravated assault. Johnson was sentenced to 120 days in jail, three years of probation and courses on anger management and parenting. He can no longer own guns.
A huge contributing factor to this near-disaster was Johnson’s disrespect and disregard for the police. This attitude leads to more danger in police interactions, despite the absurd progressive activist campaign to defund the police based on claims that it’s police presence that starts the problems.
This is not to say law enforcement does not need some reform. But it needs to be reform that puts police back into serving and protecting communities, rather than abusing citizens on behalf of the political class.
Police should also question even their own self-serving agendas. The Utah body cam footage was in stark contrast to footage from the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. There, the cams caught almost 400 law enforcement personnel unable to handle a lone shooter for almost an hour, while kids died.
In the Utah case though, it is a testament to God’s mercy and the police that no one was killed or injured through the careless abuse of firearms. There could have been causalities of officers, kids or both.
The trouble was caused due to a series of bad decisions and actions by Sadaat Johnson, as much as some want to blame the gun or the cops instead.
