A “psychotic episode” is not justification for deadly force. It may be combined with behavior that justifies deadly force but if he wasn’t hurting anyone then there wasn’t cause.
What confuses me is the tasing 4 times.
What’s the liklihood that a psychotic episode offsets the effect of a tasing? Why wasn’t the person secured with handcuffs and/or restraints immediately after the first tasing?
They have this taser that they are all too happy to use that immobilizes a person. It seems to me that failure to secure a person after being tazed once, should be a form of neglect. Especially when the failure to secure leads to the subsequent death of the tazee.
Of course if the tasers don’t have any effect and just anger the beast, then that would justify multiple tasings.
We handle animals (bears, wolves, etc.) better than this. My problem is what the “procedure” apparently allows. Just say “he moved toward me” and that’s justification for killing him. Sorry, doesn’t fly, it’s poor training and poor policy that we shouldn’t tolerate. I’m not “anti-cop” but the training never seems to emphasize “diffusing the situation” rather than escalate it. It’s always about the cop “immediately taking control of the situation”, they go from nothing to all out attack in a split second over anything. To me, that is the difference between war and civilian policing. I know many cops exercise restraint, I just don’t think that, as policy and procedure, diffusing the situation is considered enough.
I say this because I’ve seen the way cops behave in many other countries, so while I know ours have to deal with firearms, the general approach still seems too militarized. This stuff happens too often.