It is.
Love your edit to “bloodlust”. I LOLed. 
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You’re right. Who knows what happened in that first 30 seconds. Dude could have kicked a puppy or something.
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I’m going to assume the officer never made it to searching the vehicle or person here. Considering they were not going to stop how did he know they didn’t have a weapon and might have used it? Or perhaps started a high speed chase and crashed into a bus full of kids? Or a lot of other scenarios where innocent people get hurt.
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Or the ever popular …
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That’s totally irrelevant to the police officer opening fire, however. Contrary to what a lot of cops seem to think, the police do not have a right to shoot you just because you’re not doing what they want you to do.
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Public to police: “Don’t make us have to put you in jail.”
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Fair enough. I can definitely respect that and to some extent, I feel I may have over-judged (hence my edit above).
I think what may have elicited the responses you received is a misunderstanding and/or miscommunication of what seems to me—again, correct me I’m mistaken—an earnest effort to explain your judgmental restraint by giving examples. This is a tightrope, however, because such explanations can be interpreted as speculation as well. Clear language is very important in these sort of discussions. I’ve learned this the hard way myself.
Also bear this in mind: regular BB readers have, over the years, read many accounts of power abuse and physical abuse by law enforcement agents, many of which were later validated by evidence. This has a galvanizing effect, so when fresh news like this pops up—with footage, no less—that accumulated indignation is very evident in posts.
There were a few speculations in your initial post, which is more than enough fuel for the (largely justified) fire here. Like it or not, the bar for impartiality is very high here on BB, and speculations that are perceived as excuses for the perpetrator will get a backdraft of that fire.
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Very well said. You are correct in your judgment of my comments. I desire fair judgment, not knee-jerk reactions (not important for bloggers, very important for journalists). That’s rather the intent behind both my alias and my avatar. Politically, RedState + BlueState = PurpleState, and for all other things there are two sides of a coin.
I hope this is sarcasm (and I’m just not good at detecting it).
How do we know that this wasn’t a daesh terrorist with a dirty bomb? How do we know that he wasn’t some day going to miss a metal defect in a bolt that was on his production line, that would have ended up on a high rise, and would one day fail, causing catastrophic collapse, and the massive loss of life!
I’m going to say that unless a weapon is shown, you don’t get to try to assassinate a citizen. Unless you somehow have magical prescience showing that by killing this kid here, you will 100% save that theoretical schoolbus of kids, then you’re similarly not justified in attempting to kill someone.
The fact is that unless there’s demonstrable evidence that life and limb is in danger, and firing on this individual would prevent the loss of said life and limb, then this is totally unjustified.
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Your post misses the point.
The video establishes probable cause to open an investigation.
If the investigation discovers exculpatory evidence or an evidentiary basis for an affirmative defense then there’s a procedure for considering the relevance and probity of that evidence.
Your first reflex was to attack and effectively to urge that the perpetrator be immunized from the probable cause standard.
Is that because you are too racist to identify with the teen victim of an apparent attempted murder?
Some people might get that idea. I think you’re maybe just confused about probable cause.
[Edited by request of @Snowlark.]
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Love this. Anyone who wants to be a cop (or a politician for that matter) should instantly be disqualified from being one. We need a draft to fill such positions, with extensive psychological training, full time monitoring, and a policy of “you’re fired at the first hint of an offense.”
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It might be enough to pilot a project that fielded locally recruited MSWs without handguns for basic patrol. Serious professionals would be hired, and problems would start getting recognized and cooperatively solved.
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Re-reading the thread, it looks like it was @tropo to whom @PurpleStater had responded, rather than me. Our exchange took place later in the thread.
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No, my post, just like your third paragraph, was the point, though you did summarize nicely. In regards to your last sentence, I was trying to establish that without more knowledge that was provided in the video we did not know anything about the probable cause that led us to when the video began.
My “attack” was a remark directed towards the general content of comments, and nothing more than that. My comments were both pro and con towards the officer (albeit more pro, given the purpose of the story), and my intent was to encourage people to look at all evidence rather than reacting to an inciting (clickbait) headline. Until I read the actual newspaper article, which I already indicated was prior to editing my original post, I had no idea what the skin color of the driver was, but that would be irrelevant unless you are also trying to claim that the officer only acted the way he did because of it. I believe that my comments were largely neutral, only being considered not so by those who didn’t like their pre-formed opinions challenged.
If you spotted one non-speculative fact in that video that defeats probable cause for a criminal investigation, please share.
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Stories like this one make me want to read BB less. I feel like I have been trolled. Biased and exagerated. “his own dashcam footage made a liar of him” - Takes very little effort to understand how the policeman in a split second standing close to the car could feel like the car pulling forward toward him charging him. Later in the video he exactly recounts the encounter without having had time to review the footage.
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That driver shouldn’t have MADE the cop shoot him, especially not 7 times! Problem solved. \s 
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My repeated point has been that we don’t know what happened immediately PRIOR to what is shown on the video, and that’s very important to judgment. Situations like this should pretty much always have a criminal investigation. It proves innocence as well as guilt, and reinforces that fact that cops are expected to play by the rules too.
We’re both feeling the need to repeat ourselves about speculating as to what could have happened to justify discharging a firearm at an an unarmed teen who posed no threat of harm to the officer who then lied about that fact to his own dispatcher.
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From a news report about the event:
When Gallmon was released from the hospital, police transported him to a Richland County detention center, where he was charged with failing to stop for blue lights, possession of a stolen vehicle, possession of marijuana, driving without a license and several other traffic charges. Cooper was put on paid administrative leave.
It’s necessary to use extreme force to capture violent or potentially violent suspects. But why use lethal force to deal with likely-not-violent persons? Why is it not OK to let them take off, and apprehend them later when the situation has de-escalated a bit? Like backing off from high-speed chases.
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