Wild coyote spotted in Chelsea. NYPD chases it for an hour with Tasers before subduing it with a tranquilizing dart.
This morning I saw a weird headline in the
New York Times that really piqued my interest: "
Coyote Roams Upper West Side, With Officers in Pursuit." Of course, I had to click it and see if it was a joke. It wasn't. A wild coyote had somehow found its way into Manhattan and was roaming the streets.
I almost didn't read the entire article. It was short, but I was in a hurry to get my day going. Then my eyes spotted a few words that surprised me even more. At first I was surprised, then I laughed a little, then I grew angry. Here's the sentence that got me:
Earlier this month, the police captured a coyote in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan by shooting it with a tranquilizer dart after a pursuit.
Immediately I googled the words "Chelsea" and "coyote" and
learned more:
“There was a lot of cops running around with Tasers; with those long sticks,” said witness Maciej Magier.
Witnesses who saw the coyote said it was the size of a German shepherd. The coyote played cat and mouse with New York’s Finest – bobbing and weaving away from officers from the Emergency Unit toting tranquilizer guns.
It all lasted about an hour before the coyote was tranquilized with a dart and captured.
And more
below the fold:
“When we felt it was safe enough, we used our animal noose to capture the animal, and then we placed him in an animal containment box and had him taken out to the center for animal control so they could, I guess, evaluate his health and his future,” said Detective Robert Mirfield, who helped rescue the animal.
“He didn’t want to get captured,” he added.
Eventually the wild coyote is scheduled to be released back into the wild.
Who knew the NYPD had dart guns and Tasers?
Claiming that they thought unarmed teenager Ramarley Graham had a gun, the NYPD chased him down on the street and shot him in his own house in front of his family. He died because dart guns and Tasers weren't used, but lethal firearms. His family was just paid $3.9 million for his wrongful death.
Too bad the NYPD didn't "accidentally" shoot and kill Akai Gurley with a dart gun instead of a pistol in his Brooklyn stairwell.
I wonder if Amadou Diallo would've survived 41 tranquilizer shots from the NYPD instead of the 41 bullets they fired at him in his doorstep?
While it's widely accepted that it would've been grossly inhumane and unsightly for officers to pull out their pistols and blow that wild coyote to bits, lethal force is used over and over and over again on unarmed New Yorkers. In other words, the NYPD is perfectly willing to chase a wild animal with sticks and darts and Tasers for hours on end, but let a calm cool black man sell a few cigarettes on the corner and see what happens to him.