DES MOINES, Iowa — The Des Moines police chief has responded after bystander video showed a rifle sitting atop a moving cruiser, KCCI reported.
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Video taken by another driver shows the rifle resting on the back left corner of the cruiser’s roof. A driver was able to flag down the officer driving the cruiser and warn him about the gun.
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“I approached him with caution and just told him, and he was completely stunned, and I could just tell on his face like he was a little confused,” Andrea Jones, the driver who spotted the rifle, told KCCI. “And I keep telling him, and I’m like pointing, ‘There’s something up there that you might want to get.’”
Des Moines Police Chief Michael McTaggart clarified that the officer driving the cruiser, seen in the video, is not the one who put the rifle on the roof. The chief called the incident a “serious mistake.”
“At shift change, an officer was offloading his equipment, set his rifle on top of the car, and then left and left that rifle there. Next officer came in, checked that car out, and didn’t see the rifle on the roof and drove away,” said Sgt. Paul Parizek, the department’s public information officer. “I think we’ve all had a situation in our lives when we’ve misplaced something, we’re looking for it. We walk by it two or three different times. That might help explain it. But it definitely does not excuse what happened.”
The incident is under internal review, according to the report.
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