- He had just committed strong-armed robbery and assaulted the store owner.
- He was either arrogant enough or crazy enough to draw attention to himself immediately after a robbery to walk down the middle of the street.
- And he had assaulted a cop in his own cruiser.
Sometimes the cop on point gets it right. I waited for facts to start coming out to pass judgement, but from the facts I have now seen, Brown was a walking crime wave that day. And all that went down in just the space of a few minutes. Lord knows what else would have happened if he had been given another half hour on the street.
That's it in a nutshell.
If Brown had gone on to commit a more serious crime in which an innocent person was killed, then people would be screaming at the cops for not taking action when they should have.
The cop may not have known about the robbery, but he found out quickly that this was a dangerous person with some sort of chip on his shoulder, maybe on drugs. He knew that someone like that needed to be stopped then and there and not allowed to disappear while waiting for backup.
A smart criminal, after committing his crime, will do nothing to arouse the attention of police, least of all strutting down the center of a busy street. But Brown was a different sort of criminal, a confrontational thug.
He got what he deserved.