The problem is that whether a shooting is legally justified has nothing whatsoever to do with the records of the parties involved.
You may think he’s a better or worse person based on that record, but a career criminal who kills someone justifiably is and should be in exactly the same position as someone who’s led an utterly blameless life.
Except of course that the career criminal probably shouldn’t have had a gun to begin with.
BTW, I’ve seen remarkably little comment on the fact that the second cop referred to here is black. Quite black.
When there's a lack of firm,complete evidence it does.Do we know exactly what happened...*everything* that happened...from start to finish? I doubt it.Remember the Rodney King video? There were two versions...the long one and the short one.The short one showed what looked like a pretty ugly example of police "overreaction".The long version suggests that King just might have had it coming.
I am not at all convinced that we know the whole story.I'm gonna wait and see before I make up my mind.
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.