Wording a Mystery to Me

[jon]

"Police shot and injured a man late Tuesday after the vehicle he was riding in struck an officer and fled." - so reads the lead line of the lead article on the front page of the City section of this morning's Edmonton Journal.

What the {beep} does that mean? I truly don't know.

OK, now that I've read the whole article, I think it was the vehicle that "fled". Oh good, we have Journal writers spending too much time watching Knight Rider re-runs.

My niece is in Grade 2 and she would have caught and corrected that error.

[Jack Bennest]

If police shoot at a person - the perp is usually wounded or killed

I guess you can shoot a man and then say - but I missed!

[VE7ROX]

It sounds like a case of poor English and not enough wording, causing some confusion. I am not an English master or an expert in grammar, but the way I would have worded it would be to put a period after the word "Tuesday" and then the actions of the police would then be the headline. After that, I would have removed the pronoun "he" after the word "vehicle", and used the phrase "the suspect". I would have then added some extra wording after the word "fled" in order to avoid confusion between the officer and the suspect. It would then read thus:
"Police shot and injured a man late Tuesday. The vehicle the suspect was riding in struck an officer, and the offending vehicle then fled the scene of the crime, resulting in the police shooting." Too many words? I wonder if anybody out there would have a different way of putting it?

[jon]

Sorry, but it looks like now I'm the one who can't put anything clearly....

Fled is the past tense of Flee. To the best of my knowledge, only animals and people can Flee. A vehicle cannot flee. A person can flee using a vehicle, but it is the person who is doing the "flee-ing", not the vehicle.

You may have read about Night Fleeing into Day, but that is poetic license. Which has some fancy name which means speaking of a non-human as if it was human.

That is what I was getting at.

[Jack Bennest]

"Police shot and injured a man late Tuesday after the vehicle he was riding in struck an officer and fled."

okay lets get serious.

what police? Edmonton city or rcmp in the area?

did the officer struck - fire his weapon or was it another policeman?

There are more questions than answers but hey its radio

"Cops shot a purp today whose car struck a police officer on an Edmonton street. The suspect tried to escape but was punctured by the bullet."

[VE7ROX]

A vehicle cannot flee.

Yes, quite right. A vehicle only does what you make it do, so it is the driver of the vehicle doing the fleeing. It doesn't say if the suspect was a passenger or the driver. Maybe it could be worded this way:
"Police shot and injured a man late Tuesday. The vehicle the suspect was using struck an officer. The police managed to shoot and injure the man, but the suspect then used the vehicle to flee the scene of the crime."

[Jack Bennest]

The original story said he was shot after he or the car fled. To repeat myself - the story was not well written and we are not given a lot of details.

Maybe jon can give us two paragraphs from the newspaper story so we all can do a rewrite.

[Jack Bennest]

I should have looked first before asking for help


EDMONTON — Police shot and injured a man late Tuesday after the vehicle he was riding in struck an officer and fled.

Officers had cornered a Jeep Cherokee in a parking lot near 82nd Street and 144th Avenue after the police helicopter saw it being driven ing erratically and reaching speeds up to 120 km/h, Acting Insp. Regan James said.

Officers got out of their cars. That's when the driver rammed into a police cruiser that two officers were standing beside.

"The injuries resulted from that vehicle being struck and the members being beside it," James said.

One woman, who was drinking at Chimmy's Neighbourhood Pub & Grill across the avenue, said a cruiser stopped at the lot driveway, and two officers stepped out.

"The SUV stopped for a minute in the parking lot and then: 'boom.' Over the median. It hit the cop car, and one cop goes flying."

One of those officers fired a shot through the Jeep's passenger door, said Edmonton Police Association president Tony Simioni.

"As a result of his life being put in danger by the ramming of the police car and it striking him, one of the officers returned fire and it struck one of the occupants of the suspect vehicle," Simioni said.

The passenger inside was struck in the leg but was not fatally injured.

The driver managed to get around police and dumped his injured passenger.

The passenger was arrested and taken the hospital.

Police caught up with the driver near 143rd Avenue and 96th Street and arrested him.

Douglas Eugene Day, 33, has been charged with flight from police officer, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, assault with a weapon, criminal hit and run, assault with intent to resist arrest, disqualified driving, fail to stop at scene of accident with vehicle.

The passenger has not been charged with anything.

More details (full story)

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/opinion/Officer+injured+suspect+shot+north+Edmonton+chase/2463274/story.html

[jon]

I had already prepared the following before I noticed that Jack posted. But, for the record, here is the Print Edition of the story (local web ones are usually preliminary, with some errors corrected before they go to print)

Police shoot passenger
Bullet hits man sitting next to driver accused of ramming cruiser

Police shot and injured a man late Tuesday after the vehicle he was riding in struck an officer and fled.

Officers had cornered a Jeep Cherokee in a parking lot near 82nd Street and 144th Avenue after the police helicopter saw it being driven ing erratically and reaching speeds up to 120 km/h, Acting Insp. Regan James said.

Officers got out of their cars. That’s when the driver rammed into a police cruiser that two officers were standing beside.

“The injuries resulted from that vehicle being struck and the members being beside it,” James said.

One woman, who was drinking at Chimmy’s Neighbourhood Pub & Grill across the avenue, said a cruiser stopped at the lot driveway, and two officers stepped out.

“The SUV stopped for a minute in the parking lot and then: ‘boom.’ Over the median. It hit the cop car, and one cop goes flying.”

One of those officers fired a shot through the Jeep’s passenger door, said Edmonton Police Association president Tony Simioni.

“As a result of his life being put in danger by the ramming of the police car and it striking him, one of the officers returned fire and it struck one of the occupants of the suspect vehicle,” Simioni said.

The passenger inside was struck in the leg but was not fatally injured.

The driver managed to get around police and dumped his injured passenger.

The passenger was arrested and taken the hospital.

Police caught up with the driver near 143rd Avenue and 96th Street and arrested him.

Douglas Eugene Day, 33, has been charged with flight from police officer, dangerous operation of a motor vehicle, assault with a weapon, criminal hit and run, assault with intent to resist arrest, disqualified driving, fail to stop at scene of accident with vehicle.

The passenger has not been charged with anything.

The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team was notified of the shooting at midnight, executive director Clifton Purvis said.

The investigation was left in the hands of the Edmonton police because ASIRT’s resources are tied up investigating a fatal police shooting in the city from Saturday.

“We’re extremely busy right now in the wake of the weekend shooting ... If he would have died we certainly would have taken it.”

ASIRT’s mandate is to investigate incidents involving serious injuries or death that are caused by a police officer. On Saturday, 48-year-old Bernadette Auger was killed after she pointed what appeared to be a handgun at officers. They fired two shots at her. The gun she was carrying turned out to be a replica.

Purvis said Tuesday night’s shooting does fall under ASIRT’s mandate. “Clearly it’s a serious incident. “The fellow is shot in the leg, so it’s serious,” Purvis said.

“We could have taken it, but in this instance, we balanced the resources I had available and weighed them against the seriousness of the incident.”

Simioni stressed that the two shootings are unrelated and that little should be drawn from the fact they happened closely together.

“Edmonton is becoming a bigger city and a more violent and this is a reflection of that,” Simioni said. “There is no pattern. ” James said that “it’s just fate that we’ve been faced with this decision-making process a couple of times in the last five days and that’s the cards we were dealt, and we have to deal with that.”

“I can tell you that the driver of the vehicle did aggress in a very fevered manner at the member and in my own view of the evidence at hand, that member was certainly justified in taking a shot at the car.”

In the first half of 2009, the most recent time period for which public statistics are available, Edmonton police officers fired their guns six times.

In all of 2008, they fired shots nine times, according to a report prepared in August by the EPS training section.

[Howaboutthat]

This place is starting to resemble a certain other radio board with all the cutting and pasting going on.

[glaherty]

A cowboy rides into town on Friday, and leaves 3 days later on Friday. How is it possible?

[freqfreak2]

I'm thinking the horse's name is not Sunday.

[yathink]

A cowboy rides into town on Friday, and leaves 3 days later on Friday. How is it possible?

Oh good, another dead horse to beat!

[Jack Bennest]

This place is starting to resemble a certain other radio board with all the cutting and pasting going on.

my excuse Howabout is that I cannot delete or edit my posts - lol

[EX-BOSSJOCK]

I wonder how the legendary Dick Smyth, when he was at "The Big 8" ,would have reported that one ? I don't have his linguistic elasticity,so I won't try, but, I bet it would have been shocking, brutal, provocative and totally entertaining. Why did I throw that into the mix? I have no idea.