He had a bench warrant for failure to pay child support ($18,000, which is a fair chunk of change). I don’t know why he thought he could get away by running, but people do stupid things.
But RUNNING AWAY does not justify shooting him. They knew who he was and could pick him up later easily enough, and he was not wanted for a major violent felony in the first place.
Here’s the thing...if there’s a warrant for a guy...then you get up two cops and you serve warrants. If you don’t have enough cops...then you deputize some folks and they serve warrants. It’s stupid that you let a warrant sit there and a guy knows it exists....and he goes for weeks or months pretending that he’ll just sneak around the episode.
There’s no issue about the cop over-reacting, but all of this for a stupid potential warrant for lack-of-payment?
Two years ago, I recall some story out of Texas about some town and the number of outstanding warrants....they had like a thousand such warrants just sitting there and weren’t accomplishing anything with the current strategy.
Don’t worry, there will be FReepers coming on this thread to justify shooting a man in the back by a cop.
I think the lesson here is not to run away from the cops
They just might shoot you in the back
If this ass clown turned out to be a mass murderer instead of a regular gibsmedat lowlife, the cop would be a hero..
The path of least resistance apparently has no place in modern law enforcement. Even your suggestion to "pick him up later" would have resulted in a 10 person SWAT team busting down his door at 4am, tossing a few stun grenades, shooting a dog, cuffing a a couple of toddlers, tazing grandma, and then shooting Scott anyway for pointing a cell phone.
The standard for analyzing this type of event involves determining what the officer knew at the time, and what a reasonable officer would do in that event. What Slager knew at the time he started to pursue Scott was that he had a guy who was driving a car that wasn’t his and who ran when Slager started to run his license. What he knew at the time of the shooting was that guy had also attacked him.
He had no warrant information at that time, and he had no assurance the license was real. If you want to reach a realistic understanding of the event, you have to determine what the state of the officer’s knowledge was at the instant it occurred, not what was subsequently learned.
The same flaw in logic keeps coming up when an officer shoots someone holding a realistic looking squirt gun. You hear the following, “but it was just a squirt gun”, “but the officer couldn’t tell it was a squirt gun”, “but it was just a squirt gun”... and around and around. You’ll find your ability to predict the outcome of cases like this is vastly improved if you confine yourself to what was known at the time. That’ll be the standard, the rest of it’s of interest in appreciating the irony or sadness of the event, but it doesn’t put you in Slager’s place at that instant.