“he was reaching toward his waistband”
of course, if you’re not a statue made of marble, then your hands will tend to move around a little bit, and if every possible movement is either closer to or farther away from your invisible gun holster, then statistically half your movements will be deadly threats to our fine law enforcement community
The police are a white supremacist institution. When particular officers act like decent human beings occasionally, it does not change the nature of the institution.
A safe and free society won’t come from having “more cops like this guy” because even if he’s not doing it right now, this guy has the power to kill us with impunity (especially those non-white and otherwise marginalized among us) - and there’s every reason to think he will still do that in the future. That’s what needs to change. When the police are stripped of their institutional power to enforce white supremacy, patriarchy, class, etc then I’ll stop complaining about them.
The cop is also playing for time. The longer he keeps the guy busy, the more cops arrive on scene.
Or possibly waiting for the dog, who would have just loved this game.
“I can’t use the mace, he’s not sitting peacefully, it won’t work properly, look, I can’t reach the eyes!”
If we stop encumbering our LEOs with full military grade armour and weapons, then the likelihood of deadly force will be reduced and in this particular instance the suspect might have been restrained more quickly.
A “stick” swung at his “swinging stick” by a more agile LEO might have closed the incident.
(ok, ok, it’s an adult fantasy Mayberry R.F.D. scenario)
Zero. The number we’re aiming for is zero. This isn’t some “acceptable ratio” of collateral damage, no matter how life happens to be.
THAT… actually is a good point, but the cop just seemed silly here. But he also could have handed off his weapons to someone else?
The guy was apparently assaulting people before they showed up, so clearly they have little interest in protecting the public.
Running away from a suspect that is a danger to the community is the right thing now?
Benny Hill Street Blues?
Imagining that we can just praise people for treating white people well and that’ll lead to better treatment for everyone is like trickle down economics for racial justice I swear.
It looks like the cop used a spray at least a couple of times. And he did use his nightstick.
As long as the suspect was chasing the cop around he wasn’t hurting anyone else. If the cop had fled the scene entirely and left the suspect to his own devices then that would be a different matter.
It’s been 15 hours, and no one has yet set this to “Yakety-Sax”? Internet, I am disappoint.
The triple murder part does take a lot of the fun out of it.
What went wrong? Gun malfunction? Out of bullets?
If you’re planning on getting shot, not wearing clothes is a smart move. None of that pesky fabric debris in your wounds…
We don’t need to speculate about whether a naked suspect who was black would be treated differently. Here’s a story, from just over a year ago, also in Virginia.https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/05/27/marcus-needed-help-not-death-body-cam-video-shows-police-officer-fatally-shooting-naked-man/?noredirect=on
