Thread: Police called out for Duck shooting

I am no lawyer, but there are serious procedural issues here, if events occurred as reported.

I would not be asking the police to look for any evidence so long after the fact. Indeed, if shot of any description is found, it just opens up a whole can of worms.

I would be contacting a lawyer, and, based on the fact that evidence was not collected at the time of the complaint, and based on the fact that a shotgun cannot throw shot that distance, and since your mobile phone can be forensically examined to determine your precise location on the day, that there is grounds to believe that the complaint is spurious and any subsequent sanction by police is groundless.

Any investigator worth their salt would have looked for evidence of shot in the gutter at the time of the complaint. Since the police inspected your weapons, they should have made a note of the exact type of ammunition you possessed at the time. That would be able to link you to any shot found in the gutter, if the shot matched the ammunition. It may be impossible to determine the weapon that discharged the shot, but the size of any shot found in the gutter, as well as metallic composition, degree of rust, etc. could have conclusively proved whether you could have been the origin of the shot or not.

Without a record of the ammunition in your possession at the time they spoke to you and inspected your firearms, it would be very difficult to sustain your guilt even if shot was found in the gutter.

The police could, however, simply point to the fact that the person was simply annoyed - the legal test for this is so wide open it would be virtually impossible to disprove such a claim, and the fact that they made a call to police probably means that they were. However, that is not why they called on you, and they never mentioned the person being annoyed - only that the complainant alleged that shot had struck their roof.

Irrespective of the above, I would be very careful of shooting at that site again. If I were to do so, I would make sure that every member of the party had a GoPro recording everything that was said and done, every shot taken, and every word spoken to or by police, if that eventuated. Just like a dash cam, the footage could save your bacon, and serve as grounds for dismissal of the complaint against you.