2009 Shootings Of Oakland Police Officers
Two shootings of Oakland, California police officers took place on Saturday, March 21, 2009, when four officers were killed by a convicted felon wanted on a no-bail warrant for a parole violation. The convicted felon, Lovelle Mixon, initially shot and killed two Oakland police officers during a traffic stop, then killed two more when SWAT team officers attempted to apprehend him two hours later. Mixon staged an ambush of the SWAT officers from his hiding place and was killed in a barrage of gunfire as the officers returned fire in self-defense.
The killings made it one of the worst days for law enforcement in California history. It was the single deadliest attack on California police officers since the Newhall massacre in 1970, when four California Highway Patrol officers were shot and killed by two men in Santa Clarita, California.
This incident brings the total number of Oakland police officers killed in the line of duty since 1867 to 51.
Read more about 2009 Shootings Of Oakland Police Officers: The Victims, The Perpetrator, Police Officers' Funeral, Other Tributes, See Also
Famous quotes containing the words police and/or officers:
“The duties which a police officer owes to the state are of a most exacting nature. No one is compelled to choose the profession of a police officer, but having chosen it, everyone is obliged to live up to the standard of its requirements. To join in that high enterprise means the surrender of much individual freedom.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to somebody else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrel corporation.”
—Anthony Henley (d. 1745)