Dallas police officer Robert Powell has been one of the most viewed cops on TV and the Internet during the last week or so. He was the cop who stopped the Houston Texans’ Ryan Moats for rolling through a stop sign outside a Plano hospital. Moats and family members were literally just minutes away from his mother-in-law’s death inside the hospital from breast cancer. Powell unholstered his gun and generally made an ass of himself while Moats’ mother-in-law died. Today Powell resigned from the Dallas PD.
This is one of those cases you can beat like a dead horse (to death, as Yogi Berra might say). The incident was not one about right and wrong. Moats in the technical sense was wrong. He ran a stop sign and he broke the traffic laws. Even emergency drivers like firefighters or paramedics don’t get a pass on traffic laws, they have to obey them like everyone else is supposed to do.
But there is a great difference between what is right and what is common sense. Powell clearly wasn’t using common sense after he stopped Moats. Powell might have made a case for himself that would help him avoid being fired or suspended. But he would be ridiculed by both fellow officers and the public for a good while at the Dallas PD.
Moats received and accepted an apology from Powell, according to news reports. Maybe Powell actually learned something from this. Perhaps if he steps back awhile and has a chance to reflect, perhaps he can be a police officer again. But if he feels victimized for his own shortcomings then it could be he ought to find another profession, like say a call center worker.