Unfortunately, the cops couldn't read his mind.
Quit acting like it was an extended armed standoff, instead of the two snaps of a finger that it was.
I don’t expect the cops to read Scott’s mind. I expect them to use their eyes.
A man is exiting Costco quietly - enough so that the cops need someone to identify him as the ‘stumbling, drug-crazed freak’. He isn’t acting like a threat.
Yet within 6 seconds he is dead. Why? Because the cops were trigger happy. They were primed by the dispatcher & the Costco employees to expect a high-threat drug using mad man...and they based their treatment of Scott on what they expected, not what they saw.
If a man is leaving quietly, why not wait until he is in the parking lot away from other customers? And if he is acting normal enough that Costco needs to point him out, why not act as though he is innocent, and simply ask him for a minute of his time?
But they went in primed for a drug-crazed madman. They grabbed at him from behind, and then confronted him with conflicting commands, and TWO SECONDS after their first words, they opened fire. As best I can time it, Mosher pulled the trigger while saying his second “Get down!”
If you were exiting quietly, and didn’t know the cops had been told you were a wild man threatening others, and suddenly a cop shouted “Put your hands where I see them now, drop it, get on the ground, get on the ground...” - would your knees be on the ground that fast? Mine wouldn’t. Not in two seconds. Even if I made the decision to go to my knees, it would take me over two seconds because I wouldn’t want to injure my knees on the concrete.
And I probably wouldn’t make any move until the string of commands stopped, so I could figure out what the cops were saying. And if I was leaving the Costco that day, I would die for the crime of...listening? Not wanting to hurt my knees by dropping like a soldier under enemy fire? The crime of being innocent, and thinking like an innocent person?
Get a stopwatch, click go and have someone shout the commands Scott received...would your knees hit the ground in 2 seconds? Or would you die at the hands of the LVPD?
Does the LVPD have the right to kill based on hearsay?
>>The value of the unloaded chamber is that it shows proof of Scott’s frame of mind.
>
>Unfortunately, the cops couldn’t read his mind.
And here you fall into the same trapped mentality the inquest did: instead of looking at the true state of things [after the fact] and comparing them to the subjective you are assuming a position and justifying it [or at least trying to].
Sure in the adrenaline-rush of things the subjective time [order to shot] the officers felt could have been minutes... or it could have been instantaneous.
How does that compare to the actuality of elapsed time? (6 seconds? 12 seconds? I don’t think I’ve heard any estimate, even by the police, exceeding 21 seconds.)
And how does that time-interval mesh with a “reasonable person’s” compliance with those orders [esp in that sort of ‘surprise situation’]?