Fake Guns? Real Crimes... New Worries In North Texas
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ARLINGTON (CBS11) - For those in blue, the concern is black and white: "Someone is going to get hurt. Someone is going to get killed."
Lt. Christopher Cook with the Arlington Police Department says the city is seeing a spike in crimes committed with suspects brandishing very realistic looking weapons.
The department spokesperson hesitates to call them 'fake.'
"They look like a gun, they feel like a gun…there's never going to be any kind of training out there where officers will be able to make a split level decision and be able to distinguish between the two," says Lt. Cook.
A woman was carjacked near Hwy 360 and Six Flags Drive earlier this week after a suspect shoved what she thought was a gun in her face.
The man's vehicle had become disabled and he left it at the scene.
Police tracked him to a mobile home park in Arlington. SWAT officers surrounded the home thinking the man was armed.
According to police, it wasn't until officers served a search warrant and inspected the weapon that they realized it wasn't real.
Still, it was enough to send Arlington's police Chief Will Johnson onto Twitter to vent his frustration... saying "We need legislation to assist police in dealing w/ these issues. Fake guns have NO place in society."
It was just two weeks earlier that Chief Johnson began raising an alarm about these 'fake' guns. An officer was confronted by a teenager carrying a weapon that looked so real that it wasn't until after the officer knocked it out of his hand that he realized that the teen wasn't carrying a real gun.
Chief Johnson told reporters at the time that the community would be having a different conversation if the officer hadn't been close enough to knock it out of his hand and had instead opened fire.
"No officer wants to be involved in a deadly force encounter," says Lt. Cook, "and certainly don't want to be involved with one with a fake gun." Still, the veteran officer stresses that police don't have the liberty of taking the time to decide, because "hesitation gets you killed as police officer."
The worry locally mirrors a crisis playing out right now in Baltimore. Wednesday, police shot and wounded a 13-year-old who was later determined to be carrying a "fake gun."
"I've been a police officer for 25 years and there is no way on this earth that I could tell you from looking at that gun, that it wasn't real," says Baltimore Police Commissioner Kevin Davis.
According to Arlington police, suspects erroneously believe that the consequences are less severe if a fake weapon is used while committing a crime. However, in Texas, if the victim believes the weapon is real, the same penalties apply. The suspect in the carjacking is jailed, charged with aggravated robbery, a first degree felony.
"There is no reason to be able to manufacture or produce such a realistic looking weapon," says Lt. Cook, "that's really our perspective and I think the community will rally behind that message, especially when they can't even tell what's real and what's fake."
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