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I'm not a big fan of tasers, but this is one situation where it's use may have been the right choice, and had that been the case, you would have probably seen me on this thread defending this officer as vigorously as anybody.

Tasers have been deadly in rare cases.

Did you notice that the suspect threw something down with his right hand right before he was hit? How did the officer know that wasn't a weapon in his hand?

And if the suspect wasn't so focused on dumping whatever it was, perhaps he would have taken a more defensive position rather than squaring up to match blows with 250 lbs of flying doughnuts.

"Did you notice that the suspect threw something down with his right hand right before he was hit?"

"Tasers have been deadly in rare cases."

I should clarify my earlier comment about them. I said I wasn't a big fan of them. What I should have said is that I'm not a big fan of what seems to be becoming an increasingly frequent pattern of their indiscriminate misuse. Why it seems to me, from what I've read and seen of this instance, that a taser would have been appropriate here is because there was so much sketchy information. The article says police were responding to a "bloody" barfight..not a shooting, maybe a stabbing...the police didn't know if the guy was armed, much less if it was even the right guy. Certainly his running raised suspicion, but when you say he was "squaring up" with the officer, I think that's a pretty subjective interpretation. It's pretty apparent to me that he stopped and turned, about the time he didn't realize the cop wasn't going to stop or slow down and started raising his hands to brace him self more out of instinct than anything...just like anybody would if they saw someone twice their size charging at them at full speed.

Furthermore, if the cop suspected the thrown item was a weapon, the first thing he did in the seconds after getting to where the guy had dropped is to drag the so-called "fleeing felon" directly back to the thrown item! That's enough to convince me the cop wasn't even aware of the item or didn't have any suspicion it was a weapon.

Now back to my point about a taser...if he had used one here, the guy may well have smacked his head on the concrete (although I suspect it wouldn't have been with the same force) and even if it did end up with the exact same result, I'd be defending this officer instead of second guessing him.

Above and beyond the specifics of this officer's activity in this case, any person witnessing this video, or reading about this incident is going to have a greatly increased distrust and skepticism of the police. Any officer working this neighborhood, or any detective conducting a future canvass of the people who were there in future cases are going to get a lot less cooperation than they would otherwise. This officer has not only put the wrong guy in a bed for life, but he's elevated the community's mistrust of the police in general, and he's compounded the difficulty of the jobs of his fellow officers...and as far as I can tell didn't even get a written reprimand.