Cops think that a dangerous chase gives them the right to be judge, jury and hangman. I don’t care how much adrenaline you got squirting into your brain or how many near death experiences the fleeing perp puts you through, you get the guy on the ground and cuff him, read him his rights and put him in the cruiser. You want to take out your frustrations, go chop wood later that evening. A badge is not a license to punish.
The man wasn’t subdued and still needed to be. Just because he suddenly was acting reasonable doesn’t mean that he wouldn’t suddenly act unreasonably again. There was absolutely NO guarantee that he would just lie there and allow himself to be cuffed.
By definition, someone who leads police on a 100 mph+ car chase, which easily could have killed any number of people, isn’t someone to expect reasonable behavior from.
Would you have been surprised to hear if during this chase he had killed seven people in a couple of cars? Or a few pedestrians?
And how many times in your life have you been irate? Can you even say the number is less than 100?
The public debate around policing is getting warped.
Now, politicians only make errors that can’t be judged because what’s it’s not fair to use “20/20 hindsight” against them.
But the 20/20 hindsight is enough to vilify police officers.
If these officers had just done that to a man who was loitering somewhere refusing to leave, that would be one thing.
But that isn’t the case. That was an extremely difficult situation they were in, and for all they knew, that man wasn’t done putting up a fight, and who knows what he might have come up with next. They knew he had a prior record of assault.
As we can see from the Alton Sterling shooting, the physical arrest can be very difficult to do with a resisting subject (which is what this man was - never forget he fled). Reportedly Sterling was tasered, then he was physically taken down. And he resisted.
In this case, by a couple of officers using overwhelming force, they neutralized any further potential threat he posed. That can be taken as strategy. If he had been given more of an opportunity to resist, it might have been another situation where the suspect ended up shot.
For worse or better, the philosophy seems to fly in the courts that if you did zoom around in a motor vehicle on occupied public roads at ghastly rates of speed, the fuzz may then assume you more dangerously inclined than if you politely pulled over, and may assume anything that glints to be a gun.
As the not-so-nice Nice incident showed recently, a motor vehicle can be used as a guided missile.
I completely agree with what you say...and I have personally known plenty of bully cops (they were jerks in HS and know they have a license to be jerk now) BUT, we really should address that sometimes cops “act stupidly” but it is just that, not based on race. Not everything is racism.
Believe me, we have been at the bad end of racist cops her in our little town.
AND, if I chased my kids for a few miles while they tried to evade me - just WATCH OUT!