[FunkyZero]

I can think of few things that would change my opinion of what I saw on the video. There appeared to be no life-threatening situation at that moment. I can't say "regardless what led to that point" because there would be a few (very few) circumstances that could justify what happened here. It's not something you can even put a certainty on because we don't know what led up to this moment. That being said, the guy was running away and not threatening anyone and was shot in the back multiple times. That fact alone covers a lot of legal ground in itself.

I've seen a lot of people try to lump an entire case as a single event, but it simply doesn't work that way. The situations are always, 100% of the time, dynamic. If a guy shoots at you, then is lying on the ground 10 seconds later in surrender, you simply can't/don't shoot him. Even if the dead guy was a serial killer, the law tells us (in general terms) that you simply cannot kill someone who isn't an immediate threat. The same rules apply (thank God) to LEO.

People can argue whether or not he "deserved" it, but that's an entirely different debate altogether. That being said, to say someone deserved it at this point would be stepping across a line as well, we simply don't know what went on and we never will (completely). The cops will craft their story to their own benefit, it is just how humans are... sad as it may be. We expect higher standards from the police, but incidents since the dawn of the cheap video age have shown us what many people have claimed since the beginning.

[Sherman Logan]

Excellent comments.

People seem to want to make the reasonableness of the cop’s shooting dependent on whether the shootee was a bad enough guy. The problem is that this (usually) is completely irrelevant. At the moment of the shooting the cop usually doesn’t even know the background of the other guy, so it’s stupid to give him a pass on the shooting because the guy was a serial child rapist and murderer. The cop didn’t know that!

Similarly, it’s equally stupid to assign greater blame to the cop because the guy was actually a wonderful human being just having a bad day or off his meds, or for that matter whose innocent actions were completely misunderstood. The cop didn’t know that!

It’s only reasonable to hold the cop accountable, positive or negative, based on what he knew at the time. Those who do this, whether pro or con to the cops, are using hindsight to decide whether the shooting was justifiable.

In the cases I describe above, the serial child rapist/murderer certainly deserved anything that could conceivably be done to him. But, as you say, that’s a whole other argument.