Baltimore’s police commissioner says there is no evidence so far that a man who fired at four officers with an AR-15-style weapon had ambushed them.
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At 9:20 p.m. on Thursday, four detectives in an unmarked police auto heard the sound of gunfire and pulled into a parking lot in the 2300 block of Winchester Street, where they saw Harper armed with a long gun, Davis said. “He was firing that weapon and he turned that weapon toward officers and started firing the weapon toward officers and the officers returned fire”.
Baltimore Police recently started to wear body cameras, but only one of the officers was wearing one at the time of the shooting, Davis said.
The suspect was shot at least once and retreated to the apartment building, where he was found on the second-floor landing, according to the spokesman. Harper was taken to a hospital, where he died.
Police show the gun used by a man who shot at police officers in west Baltimore Thursday night.
The suspect hasn’t yet been identified.
In response, Republican lawmakers drafted the Back the Blue Act, which debuted on Thursday, to help protect police officers in the line of duty by imposing strict minimum sentences for individuals who kill or injure police officers, as Gretel Kauffman reported for The Christian Science Monitor.
Four plainclothes officers heard gunfire and drove towards it where they got into a shootout, WBALTV reports. Police said that Harper, believed to be wounded, ran through an open area of the apartment building and threw the weapon into some trees. A police spokesman said the officers treated Harper but couldn’t move from their position, and paramedics could not go to them. “I’ve never seen nothing like this happen”, said a woman who asked not to be identified. But the commissioner said recent mass shootings and the targeting of police in Dallas makes this “a unique time, a challenging time”. We did not know if we had more than one suspect on the scene. He lamented the ease with which he said criminals can obtain firearms in Baltimore. A SWAT team and Baltimore County Police eventually arrived to comb the vicinity. The shooting comes amid outrage and protests over the shootings by police of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota, and the retaliatory attack by a black sniper that killed five police officers in Dallas.
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Deliberate attempts to injure police officers would result in a mandatory two-year stint in jail, no matter the severity of the injury.
