“I believer there were a number of contributing factors that resulted in this accidental shooting.”
The number 1 reason for this is cops are no longer afraid of making mistakes. They watched numerous other shootings like this, and even the Dorner hunt foul ups. And the lesson they took away is that no one was punished.
Toss in training cops to be paranoid, and the results are predictable.
As for training, sorry no pass. He is a grown man who is carrying a weapon professionally. He is responsible for knowing what he is doing with it. A heart surgeon can’t blame his professor. A truck driver doesn’t get to blame his teachers.
If you or a member of your family decided to become a cop, do you think either of you would soon come to a place where you wouldn’t care if you killed someone accidentally or not?
I don’t think that’s true. I don’t believe it to be true of others. Could there be a few out there like this? Perhaps. It’s just not the main stream thought for police officers.
There are hundreds of thousands of police officers out there. We hear about the times when mistakes are made. Sometimes we extrapolate out what seems to make sense, but hearing opposing thoughts are important on these matters. They cause us to think, to realize there may be another explanation out there.
Do you think this young officer blew this off, it didn’t really affect him negatively? I’ll bet the guy is very shaken up by it. I’ll bet he questions his decision to join the force. I think it’s probably a life changing event for him.
Of course he doesn’t have it as bad as the guy that was killed, but he will carry this with him for the rest of his life. How would you feel if you had done this? Is there a reason to think he would feel differently about it?
Go with the human nature you know in yourself. Don’t think these are people who are totally different than you. Yes they go through training, but they do so because they are going to come up against the worst people in our society.
You either develop a tough skin, or you can’t do your job. It’s still a job that down deep inside causes them the same types of anguish you would have.