'Defund the police' activist Alyssa Milano calls police on teen shooting at squirrels

Alyssa Milano is all for defunding the police, except when she needs them. She called 911, bringing a massive amount of police to her neighbourhood, after she suspected that there was an armed gunman near her house. Turned out to be a teen shooting squirrels with an air gun, and not a nasty gunman out to get her.

The Daily Mail reports that Milano called the police to her Bell Canyon home on Sunday morning. Seven vehicles showed up courtesy of the Ventura County Sheriff's department, including a k-9 unit, a helicopter, and squad cars. An LA Fire Department team hung out at the end of the street just in case they were needed.

"We first noticed the helicopter circling overhead very low and knew something was going on, it's usually such a quiet community," a neighbour told the Daily Mail. "Then we saw all the police cars parked in front of Alyssa's home. They had their guns at the ready and seemed very serious."

Milano and her husband were worried that she might have a stalker, and that's why they issued the call, despite the star's notable activism in favour of defunding police. Neither she nor her husband called a mental health unit to the scene to do an assessment of the suspected gunman and stalker, who turned out to be a kid with an air gun.

The police searched the area for three hours before calling it off. A neighbour said that "It turned out it was a neighborhood teen with an air gun shooting at squirrels."

The teen saw the massive police response, and when he realized that he was the cause of it, he reported himself to police and cleared up the celeb's confusion. Officers on the scene met with neighbours and the whole thing was jokingly referred to as "Squirrelgate."

Milano's interest in police defunding appears to be for everyone else, and not when it comes to her own needs. A neighbour told the Daily Mail "She can tweet those things because at the end of the day she lives behind gates in a gated community. She knows the police will come to save her. But what about all those people who don't have that luxury and live in unsafe neighborhoods? She obviously doesn't care.

"She uses her platform in hypocritical ways. Why not send your husband into the yard to find out what is actually going on before you call the police? I would guesstimate the response today from law enforcement cost tax payers thousands of dollars."

Milano replied via Twitter, saying the she was not the one to call police, and that her neighbour did it on her behalf. However, since she has young children at home, she thought it was justified to get the police involved, and thanked the Ventura County Sheriffs, and those "officers who came to protect and serve our neighbourhood."

Her description of events is that a "neighbor spotted 'a man dressed in all black, walking in the woods between our properties with a gun,'" noting that "that is a rare sight in our parts." After she received a call "alerting us to the potential situation and that officers had been dispatched," her husband called 911 to find out what time the officers would be arriving.

The officers, she noted, who she has advocated for defunding, made her family "feel safe and secure" as her family "sheltered in place." She stated that the youth, who had been squirrel hunting and was the reason for the aggressive police response, "apologized for the commotion he had caused."

In defense of her position to defund police, she said that these are "exactly the type of situations"—teens shooting airguns at squirrels— "that police officers are trained for and should be responding to..."

Milano said that they'd "love to see equally trained non-police professionals" respond to crises involving people with addiction and mental health issues and "non-violent events." A non-violent event, for example, as teen with an airgun, shooting at squirrels.