Thank you for providing that information.
When I first heard about this, I was told it was 7 minutes from the time cops arrived until they shot him. Then, I listened to the audio tape and in the comments it was reported that the police were there for 30 minutes.
It may be that the time from the reception of the 911 call until the shot were fired was 30 minutes.
Unless I can find different, I stand corrected.
The fact still remains that the Cops on site knew that everyone was being evacuated from the store, including Mr. Scott, and then testified that they weren’t ready when he came out.
The cops had agreed to have the customers evacuated and not to ‘alert’ Mr. Scott. How could they not ‘know’ he was coming ?
Why couldn’t they have just asked him calmly to lie down and wait until their superiors arrived, instead of pointing guns at him and yelling conflicting instructions?
You know, this was a tragedy all around, and no matter how it gets dissected, I don't think that's going to change.
Your counterfactual question is probably the only way to extract any good out of this terrible situation, ie, what can we in the CCW community, and those in LE, do better to prevent such tragedies in the future? Specifically, you direct your question to the officers: Why couldn’t they have just asked him calmly to lie down and wait until their superiors arrived, instead of pointing guns at him and yelling conflicting instructions?
It seems to me that things went south a couple of minutes earlier than that, when LVPD units placed themselves in a position to make contact with the subject, albeit inadvertently, prior to having sufficient numbers on scene, and having less-lethal options brought forward by the supervisor. (An ancillary question may involve putting less-lethal options in more patrol cars, to allow patrol officers to be able to deploy those options prior to a supervisor's arrival).
Granted, that's Monday morning quarterbacking, but I think the PD would have had a better chance of disarming Scott safely, with additional officers present with at least some less-lethal weapons available, which of course, is what they were trying to set up: that plan was OBE.
There's more, perhaps for the next thread, if tempers here manage to cool.