Spirit of Hope wrote:Geilinor wrote:He had refused to put a deadly weapon down, so the officer could have reasonably believed that he would use the knife.
here we are talking about the original Ferguson shooting instead of the St. Louis shooting. I haven't really sean any argue the St. Louis shooting was unjustified once the video came out. However there is still a lot of doubt and lack of understanding regarding the original shooting.
Well, I would...
Or rather, I would argue that it was, at the very best, a horrible mistake and, at worst, completely unjustified.
Firstly, the officers do not, at any point in time, try to deescalate the situation. They drive their car straight up to him and get out with guns drawn. They could have stopped further away and approached the guy slowly. They could have tried to talk him into surrendering. They could have used a tazer or peberspray... Plenty or ways they could have avoided this outcome.
Secondly, the guy goes down with the first few shots, yet they keep on firing.
Thirdly, they obviously try to cover it up by pretending to arrest him after he was clearly dead.
One thing I think people are forgetting is that we pay cops to do a nasty, sometimes dangerous, job. It's part of their job to put themselves at risk. And that sometimes means confronting a suspect with less than overwhelming force. Two well-trained, and well-armed, officers against a single disturbed individual with a knife? There's absolutely no reason to resort to deadly force within 20 seconds of arriving on the scene.
Sometimes an officer gets hurt, even killed, in the line of duty. And that's what they're being paid for - to put themselves in danger when needed. And that also includes risking a knife wound in order to subdue a man that seems to have belonged in a mental hospital.