Farmington, New Mexico, isn’t a tiny rural town. It’s a city as big as Bremerton, Washington, with a police department.
On Wednesday, April 5, 2023, Farmington cops were dispatched to 5308 Valley View Avenue on a domestic call.
“Domestics,” as they’re called, are well known to police as potentially dangerous. They can get caught in the middle of ugly family fights that may suddenly turn violent. So they approach with caution.
When the Farmington cops arrived at 5305 (sic) Valley View Avenue, “Body camera footage shows the officers knocking on the door and announcing themselves as members of the Farmington Police Department, according to an account by New Mexico State Police. When nobody answered, the officers backed away,” … and then “52-year-old Robert Dotson opened the screen door armed with a handgun.”
“What followed, said Farmington Police Chief Steve Hebbe, ‘was a chaotic scene, with officers retreating and opening fire.’” Dotson was shot, and then his wife opened fire on the cops with a handgun, until she realized they were cops.
Bob Dotson is dead. Neither his wife nor any cops were hit in the flurry of gunfire. The fighting neighbors across the street probably wondered what the hell was going on. The cops went to the wrong address, that’s what. (Read story here.)
There will be an investigation to find out who screwed up, and how; did the dispatcher give the officers a wrong address number, or did the cops hear it wrong because of radio static or distracted attention or — ??? Why did a city dweller answer a door knock with gun in hand? Was he a paranoid freak? Did he greet Amazon and UPS drivers this way? Or had there been trouble in the neighborhood?
News stories about incidents like this usually don’t publish street addresses, but this one did, so I looked them up on Zillow (see photos below). I’ll bet lots of people are. It’s a one-block street of nondescript homes, not upscale, but no ghetto, either. A bit of digging on my part places in smack in the middle of Farmington’s high-crime area (see map here).
Farmington also is Trumper country. Biden won New Mexico by 10 points (54%-44%), but Trump carried San Juan County, where Farmington is a third of the county population, by 28 points (62%-38%); so I figure there’s a roughly two-thirds probability that street has more guns than people.
Domestic incidents have been around since the dawn of our species. Actually, longer; apes beat up their mates (see research report here), so it seems likely our pre-hominid ancestors probably did, too. I’m not making any big scientific pretensions here; I admit the connection between cracks found in 2 million-year-old hominid skulls and what happens on Valley View Avenue is a big tenuous.
But some things are obvious, and don’t require a Ph.D. in anthropology to figure out. One of them is that gun fever has gotten stupidly out of hand in our country. I don’t really know why; maybe part of the reason is we’ve gotten increasingly angry at each other, perhaps partly out of cabin fever, although America’s civilian arms race began long before the pandemic arrived and shut people in their man-caves.
All I know is Americans are shooting at each other a lot, and when they shoot at cops, they usually don’t come out the other side. Back in 1866, U.S. Army Captain William J. Fetterman boasted he could “ride through the whole Sioux nation” with 80 men (actually, 81 men, counting himself); and while he rode into the whole Sioux nation (or a substantial part of it), he and his troop didn’t come out the other side. The photo at left shows what this kind of thinking got him. Shootouts with the police are like that, too. But I’m digressing.
I guess the point is guns are a bad idea in nearly all circumstances. Sending police to the wrong address is a bad thing, too, but Bob Dotson probably would still be alive if he hadn’t answered his door with a gun in his hand. I can’t really fault the cops, once you get past the address screwup, because what were they supposed to think? This was a domestic call, they thought he was a wife-beater, and he answered the door with a gun. So they shot him to protect themselves, because everybody knows domestics are the most dangerous kind of police dispatch there is.
Maybe the best answer to this sort of thing is fewer guns in our society? And cooler heads, less jumpy citizens? I dunno, maybe we’re past a point of no return with respect to that.
Related story: A new Gallup poll shows 2/3rds of Americans think U.S. gun laws are too lax (see story here).
The wrong house:
The right address:
