Watch the body cam everyone. This situation really, really sucked.
The cop was trapped in a tiny green belt walkway with nowhere to go. He had to either risk taking a full on hit from a 40lb pissed off dog at full speed or defend himself with lethal force.
With a person behind his field of fire, a better decision would have been to not fire. But if you put yourself in his shoes for those few seconds from the start of the video and had to make a decision right when he did... can you say you wouldn’t have fired? I’m not saying he was right but it was scary as hell and it happened incredibly fast.
A person lying in a very strange and dangerous narrow place with no easy exit and no cover to take. A dog with no leash. No idea what’s going on. It was pretty terrible.
I’ve had a lot of dogs, I love dogs. But that situation... such a stackup of bad things all at once. A simple leash in that narrow corridor and that entire string of events over those 5 seconds or so didn’t need to happen at all.
Yup..so right. Battle situation where guys throw themselves on a grenade to save their friends.
In this situation, coward cop shoots victim to save himself from a 40# dog.
Thank God he made it out alive.
can you say you wouldn’t have fired?
I absolutely positively would not have fired. A 40 lb dog doesn’t scare me that much and is not an immediately lethal threat. I’ve been attacked and bitten many times. A cop has a duty to the community before and as well as to himself. Back when cops were men they knew this. Back when cops were men they’d have been disgusted by this display of abject cowardice.