Video of 5 San Francisco police officers shooting a Black man dead goes viral

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WTF?? That’s…just…

I have no words.

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Isn’t this precisely the use case for a police dog? Uncooperative suspect but armed with a knife, so they don’t want to tackle the guy.

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Or while they can still be lethal maybe try the taser first?
I hate to think of how much shit the police got away with before the ubiquity of cameras to record things…

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An officer’s gun isn’t a compliance tool. It’s a defense of last resort.

Fuck the police culture that makes videos like this.

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All I keep thinking of is this video from the UK where Bobbies subdue a clearly disturbed man wielding a machete using nothing but manpower and riot shields:

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I read elsewhere about this incident that the SF police are barred from carrying tasers, and that they shot him with beanbag rounds first to no effect.

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Still not an excuse for this. Hell years ago much to the Seattle PD credit (what little they can get these days) they dealt with an unstable man with a sword by calling a firetruck and hosing him down. No fucking excuse for firearms.

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I agree, it’s not. I don’t think it’s a police officer’s duty to wrestle a knife wielding PCP fiend to the ground, but they could have, say, shot him once in the leg rather than a dozen times in the chest.

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COP 1: “Is he complying yet?”
COP 2: “Nope. Still standing.”
COP 1: “Fuck it, let’s just shoot him and get lunch.”

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But a shot in the leg would still leave him twitching on the ground. He might still crawl towards officers in a menacing way.

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Or bleed on them.

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Exactly. Who knows what diseases these poor people have. Plus, the cleaning bill for blood can be murder.

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You just went right there, didn’t you? :heart:

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That last photo in Xeni’s post could become iconic. It’s just straightup execution. Just like so many other murders-by-cop.

Yes. Now comfortable folks can better know what afflicted folks have known all along. For centuries.

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[quote=“deedub, post:9, topic:70224, full:true”]
I agree, it’s not. I don’t think it’s a police officer’s duty to wrestle a knife wielding PCP fiend to the ground, but they could have, say, shot him once in the leg rather than a dozen times in the chest.
[/quote]I’ve heard from police officers before that policy is that if you shoot, you always shoot to kill, and never to wound. The idea is that a gun is too dangerous to use in any situation where you don’t fear for your life or the lives of others, so you never use it in any situation where you don’t consider lethal force necessary.

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I wonder if the reason so many of the police shot him so many times is for plausible deniability - I mean, who actually killed him? (could that be the basis of a legal argument)

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I want to say something, but I can’t. a person killed, the cops get a paid vacation and will probably be back on the job in no time. what the hell is wrong with this country?

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I believe police officers are trained not to shoot to wound with regular firearms.

Shooting to wound also, I think, doesn’t work nearly as well as in the movies. Shooting someone in the leg is a lot harder, and still quite likely to kill them.

Perhaps there should be some more training along the lines of ‘stop shooting when the suspect is not armed with a gun if they start to go down’?

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I’d extend that to “don’t shoot any person who isn’t armed with a ranged weapon unless they are actively charging faster than you can safely retreat.”

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