Stay in your car. Glad officer is facing charges. You can understand him being concerned, but you can't shoot like that.
Besides the obvious stupidity of the thing, it's disturbing that he shot at the guy four times in broad daylight at a distance of, give or take, 10 feet and he only hit him once. And the two final shots were while the driver was standing in plain sight trying to put his hands up. Jesus...
I think it's time for AP-12+ http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-law-enforcement-robot-can-wield-excessive-forc,36220/
While this is true, it's a guy in a wheelchair, with one arm and leg, and a severe mental disability wielding a pen. If a cop can't handle this without resorting to duck-hunt, God help the HPD.
If you re-watch it, it looks like the guy is parking his car and just getting out of it at the gas station. He looks startled that there is a cop there like he never noticed or the cop had just swung up on him. It looked like a routine exit from a car without realizing he was in the middle of a traffic stop.
Oh I agree. You would hope police could handle themselves without having to kill people who are obviously mentally ill and swinging a pen from a wheelchair.
And this was the result of rigorous gun training that is supposedly part of the police academy's curriculum...? Perhaps, the NRA should lend out some of their experts to let them in on the real gun owner's guide to proper gun training that apparently will enable any adult, particularly teachers, to be a well-trained, thoroughly disciplined gun handlers that will always know when to turn to their highly dangerous weapon as a tool to resolve any "perceived" dangerous situation...
That trigger-happy state trooper didn't come close to following protocol. Throw the book at him. Thankfully the victim is recovering well, and thankfully there was a camera recording the whole thing. The cop is also a grade-A dumbass for opening fire at a gas station. He's lucky none of the bullets struck a gas pump or a bystander.
as a citizen, I am not comfortable with a state owned police force that is trained specifically not to trust its citizenry lol seatbelt violation
It's human nature, how many times are you going to get assaulted, shot at, and cussed before you start looking at people differently? How many times have we seen videos of routine traffic stops end with someone pulling a weapon on the cop or attacking them? In theory I agree with you that I don't like a police force that doesn't trust the public.....but that's not reality.
When human nature leads to wrongful deaths of people who don't deserve to die, then changes need to be made, no?
There will always be times when things go wrong and I think you punish the cops when that happens. If a cop wrongfully shoots someone, they should be fired and incarcerated. Bad cops should be weeded out whenever possible.
When you are endowed by the state as an official agent with the capacity to employ lethal force, you are automatically required to behave to a higher standard. That is what the training is for. Human nature is no defense in court or in the field. Fodder for discussion: http://www2.gsu.edu/~wwwexa/news/archive/2009/09_0330-policemultitask.html Cops who multitask well less likely to shoot unarmed persons when threatened, study shows ATLANTA – In the midst of life-threatening situations requiring split-second decisions, police officers with a higher ability to multitask are less likely to shoot unarmed persons when feeling threatened during video simulations, a new Georgia State University study suggests. Heather Kleider, Dominic Parrott and Tricia King, assistant professors of psychology at Georgia State, have taken a unique look at officer-involved shooting situations, signs of negative emotions and working memory capacity — the capacity to perform multiple mental tasks, such as reasoning, at the same time. Other studies have examined factors such as ethnicity, stereotypes, neighborhood crime rates and other factors, but this study examines the effects of police officers’ characteristics on shooting decisions. “In cognitive psychology, operation span, or working memory, is an overarching cognitive mechanism that indicates the ability to multitask, and the amount of available capacity to perform tasks varies by individual and situation,” Kleider said. “People with a higher capacity are able to keep more things ‘in play’ at one time.” Urban police officers participated in the study, completing a test of working memory capacity, and then watched a video of an officer-involved shooting that resulted in the death of the officer, during which time negative affect and stress indicators were measured; including elevated heart rates and increased sweating. Following the video, officers participated in a computer-based simulation where they were required to make split-second decisions whether to shoot or not to shoot someone, based on 80 slides that presented a person holding either a gun or a harmless object like a cell phone, for only a fraction of a second. Officers then pressed either a “shoot” or a “don’t shoot” button. Analyzing the data, the researchers found that lower levels of working memory capacity increased the likelihood of shooting unarmed people among those officers who had higher levels of negative emotionality — a score determined by comparing readings of facial movement and heartbeat rates between a baseline reading and readings taken during the stressful situation. Officers with a higher working memory capacity seemed to buffer officers against the negative effects of a threat when making shooting decisions. “An important thing to consider is that some decision making requires controlled processing wherein balanced/accurate decisions require impulse control” Kleider explained. “For some people, this usurps a substantial amount of available working memory capacity to control impulses, and if you are someone with a lower capacity, it's harder to do.” Psychologists are not sure whether working memory capacity can be increased with training, but Kleider and her colleagues are planning to investigate this, and are also planning to work with several police departments on a broader study to see if training and years of experience influence shooting decisions. The study, “Shooting Behavior: How Working Memory and Negative Emotionality Influence Police Officer Shoot Decisions” will appear in a 2009 edition of Applied Cognitive Psychology.
