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For me, the one “mitigating fact” for the officer is that she rammed his car, almost hitting him, before he fired. If she had simply taken off after being stopped, his firing his gun would be utterly ludicrous. It isn’t, if he almost got crushed. It would put him in a different mindset, assuming he is a normally functioning human being.

Except that, according to the excerpt, he was still the aggressor:
When the shooting took place, Wilson was outside his patrol car. He had used a bumping maneuver to force her car to stop on Camino Carlos Rey.

(I can't watch the vid right now, so I don't know how accurate the description is.)

When the shooting took place, Wilson was outside his patrol car. He had used a bumping maneuver to force her car to stop on Camino Carlos Rey.

Don't they do that when a car refuses to pull over. I watch a lot of youtube police chases. That seems to be pretty common when they get the chance. So sure, he was “the agressor” from a certain point of view.

As Chris Rock said in his hilarious video, ‘How not to get your a$$ kicked by the pOlice.” If you run, the cops are bringing an a$$ kicking with them. Or, in this case, after she backed into his car, narrowly missing him and pumping up his adrenalin even further, firearm discharge in your general direction.

No, I don't think the cop was right to do what he did, but mitigating circumstances as I understand them warrants him finding another job, but not prison time.

And I rarely find myself coming to the defense of cops. It's usually the opposite. And I am only defending up to a point for a simple reason: being a man, I know the heart of man. You take your life into your own hands when you attack one with deadly force and he has been given limited authority to do what most people wouldn't be allowed to do.

For the video challenged...The officer used the PIT maneuver to stop the car and it positioned the fleeing car alongside the officers driver side door/front quarter panel (exact angle unknown). All that you can see next is contact made with the police car and the officer shooting as the driver attempts to flee.

If the driver backed into the police car while the officer was exiting the car, then it would have been a very dangerous position, potentially life threatening, for the officer to be in. With that said, you can't actually see where he was in the video at the time the contact was made.