Was not responding to commands to put down his weapon???
The entire engagement, from the time the deputies stopped the car to when the one shot the boy, took ten seconds.
Most people, especially harebrained teenage boys, take a few seconds to comprehend what is going on around them, let alone respond in a timely and appropriate manner. So using this idea of “shoot them as they turn around,” almost ANYONE, especially an INNOCENT person who does not have mayhem on his mind, is likely to be shot by LEOs.
Does this seem morally right to you?
Your comment confirms what I’ve been thinking for a while: we need a national conversation on the rules of engagement for LEOs. The ones we have right now are not working well too much of the time.
I mean no disrespect, but there are a number of unsupportable assumptions in that statement. First of all, we did the exercise in class in slow motion. At each state of the turning, the instructor asked us whether we would shoot. At about the point when the barrel of the (pretend) AK47 is, say, half a second from lining up on you, and the person holding the weapon can see you, that's when you feel there's no time left for niceties. Act now or someone dies, maybe me. In real time, that period of decision could take less than a second to pass.
I'm glad I have not been in that situation, yet. In the exercise, I was too slow to decide, even in slow motion. If the gun was a toy, you'd have your happy ending if I was the cop. If the gun was real, and he pulled the trigger first, I wouldn't be here, I'd have been killed in an instant, leaving behind a family who loves me and depends on me. Not a very happy ending.
I made other fatal mistakes during related exercises in that class. If you're ever in a bank robbery situation, and you're carrying, try to remember the robber probably has an undisclosed accomplice who can take you out if you try and pull your gun on the guy collecting the wallets and jewelry.
Bottom line, the police have developed the training they have for a reason. They want the bad guys to go down, the innocent bystanders to stay safe, and the cops to make it home alive on any given night. If the training can be tweaked to account for some of the more difficult scenarios, fine. Do that. But understand that once you're in the situation, you're going to fall back on your training. Superman is a fictional character. There will be no super-brilliant high speed decision-making. There will be no reading of minds. There will only be reflexes based on what you see and hear. Period. That's why you over-train.
As to your question of morals, I am a Christian, so that's my moral lens. And in the long history of Judeo-Christian law, murder isn't and has never been the same as killing someone through an honest mistake in judgment. You could perhaps make a case for manslaughter if you could show the judgment was reckless or unreasonable in some objective way. But here even that would be difficult to do, because the officer's judgment, as we understand it so far, appears to be within the norm for persons in his situation.
BTW, I should mention that my instructor brought up the unpleasant spiritual aftermath of killing someone, even when fully justified under law and morality. It's not something any LEO I have ever known wanted to have to deal with, years of second-guessing themselves and wondering, with their reason, not their reflexes, could they have done something differently? I am sure there are bad eggs out there to who this does not apply, but I have had the statistical good fortune of never meeting one.