Bodycam shows judge telling officer to shoot a suspect for refusing to leave his office
A police bodycam captured the moment when a Pennsylvania judge told a police officer to shoot a man who refused to leave his office. The judge later released a statement saying that his comments were not supposed “to be taken seriously.”
What’s the story?
When Brian Jones refused to leave Allegheny County Magistrate Thomas Caulfield’s office, a Forest Hills police officer asked him how he’d like to proceed “in the future.” Presumably, the officer was asking whether or not Caulfield wanted to press charges or to deny Jones entry. Caulfield decided to take it a step further.
“I want you to shoot him,” Caulfield said, tersely.
The officer seemed to ignore the comment and continued to explain to Caulfield about the law regarding this kind of behavior.
Hey, in my world, if you are in a private residence, it’s easy, you’ll convey that he’s to leave. He’s not welcome here, he’s not here on business. And then we actually communicate it. That usually doesn’t happen, but it usually starts to move in that defiant thing, the defiant section of criminal trespass. That’s how I perceive it when it starts to become like this foolishness. I don’t know how you think of it here.
Caulfield repeated a second time: “Shoot him.”
Did the judge apologize?
After the bodycam footage was released as part of a criminal case involving Jones, Caulfield released a statement that said:
I apologize for making the statements in the video. I would like to acknowledge that the statements I made in the video were inappropriate. It was certainly not my intention for these statements to be taken seriously and I deeply regret any harm that this has caused.
Jones, however, remained unconvinced.
“I don’t think he should be on the bench,” he said, according to the TribLIVE.com, a Pittsburgh-area newspaper. “Him apologizing to someone else means nothing.”
Caulfield was appointed by former Gov. Ed Rendell (D) in 2010. He has been re-elected to that position twice since then.
