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Except she wasn’t charging, she was cowering in the ground in her own home while somebody pointed a gun at her after theatening to shoot her in the fucking face.
I wouldn't get into the mechanics of it all, but a person "cowering" with a weapon can very quickly turn into a person "charging" with a weapon. They are not neutralized/incapacitated merely by laying on the floor.
The greater context of the situation very much weighs against shooting her, but I really think people don't get how the presence of a weapon, ANY weapon, escalates the nature of the threat.
Here's a 2020 incident where the perp surprises and slashes one officer, who doesn't immediately shoot her, perp drops the knife and appears to comply for a moment, then suddenly swoops down to pick it up again and charges another officer.
https://nypost.com/2020/09/03/bodycam-footage-florida-woman-stabs-cop-ahead-of-fatal-shooting/
Until the person is either fully restrained or, unfortunately, poked full of holes, they are posing a danger.
The weapon in the current case being boiling water is a really unique twist, but the principle is the same.
These cops are also posing a danger to her.
Well yeah they came into her house and started making demands and bossing her around. I wouldn't blame her for feeling threatened.
It is unclear how her actions improved on the situation though.
To be clear, my presumption whenever a standard police encounter results in a death is to assume the cops fucked up royally. That seems to be the case here. It is a rebuttable presumption, though.
She acted irrationally, but if people have to walk on eggshells around police to avoid being shot, then people (especially mentally unstable people) will tend to avoid the police at all costs, which is not good for law enforcement. (Not suggesting you disagree.)
Right. I think the whole problem with judging these situations is that they tend to be interactions between cops, who are already edgy about being ambushed, and less-than-rational types who are edgy because they know they might be arrested or they're just suffering from a mental condition that affects judgment. Cops are more likely to encounter those types than the average citizen. So these interactions come with some extra hostility/tension built in.
(there's valid debate as to how much of this cops bring upon themselves when they have a very aggressive approach to policing and the fact that they have less accountability)
For example, here are a couple other semi-recent police encounters:
One where the cops take out a dude who is directly threatening another person's life:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=zi4Lw981G9w?si=E5riO0NlRu_KEIq4
Obvious good shoot, with plenty of time to set up, take aim, attempt de-escalation, and act at the most opportune moment.
And another where holy shit a 'standard' traffic stop IMMEDIATELY results in automatic gunfire their way:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6UzsEvst1MI?si=a2bokSAmX2vJGAct
These are the two extremes of the sort of situations cops can find themselves in.
We'd all love for every police shooting to look like the first: obvious justification, attempts at de-escalation, and minimal force employed (one bullet, in that case). But cops have a general (not entirely rational, odds are they'll never face such a situation) concern about suddenly being confronted with the second situation.
So I dunno, I don't blame police for treating suspicious characters with a vague sense of hostility, but some subset of those characters are going to respond very badly to their presence, and if they're truly irrational, then we should be scrutinizing the cop's actions harder, overall.
I was expecting this to be a typical "people call a semi-auto weapon 'automatic' to sound scarier" situation, but I was at least responsible enough to click on the video before jumping in with "ACKSHUALLY," and wow.
This was less than a month ago? How frequent are machine gun attacks in LA?
At first I assumed it was one of those glock switches, but apparently it was an actual rifle and those cops are just obscenely, obscenely lucky.
Situation looks like its from GTA.
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