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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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