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I'd like to be clear, this was done to a department issued rifle??? or his own personal property??
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I'm from Florence, AZ so this is local to me. No, this was the officer's privately owned AR-15 (semi-auto only) which he was authorized to carry on duty.
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The inscription does not seem consistent with a L.E.O.'s duty to protect and serve.
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No, it certainly doesn't. I'd be willing to bet that if anyone in the department inspected his rifle prior to authorizing him to carry it, (s)he is regretting it now!
I don't know any of the particulars of the case, except what has been reported on the news. It's hard to see how this officer felt an imminent threat of deadly force from a suspect who was proned out in the hallway of a hotel, with other officers backing him up (none of which fired). One of the more challenging (sadly) tasks I tried to accomplish in my close to 20 years of experience training judgmental use of force to law enforcement agencies was convincing some young idiots that "I was in fear for my life" wasn't a magic get-out-of-jail-free card; that you actually had to BE threatened with deadly force.
