Once again something has happened which causes people to question police use of force. Personally, I agree with the police this time around.
A young man's mother calls in to 911, saying in a rather bemused tone that her son is going nuts. You can hear him in the background screaming madly that he has a gun. Shocked, the 911 operator asks if she's hearing right. The mother states that yes, he's saying he has a gun.
Police arrive on the seen to the young man first in the apartment with knives, then advancing outside with something else. That "something else" in the dark looks like a gun, and he's yelling that he has a gun and screaming, "Come get me. I have a gun. Let's do this."
He died in a hail of gunfire. He was holding a hairbrush.
No, I do not blame police. The mother--though she's suffered a terrible tragedy and I respect that--should have been clearer on the phone that he really did not have a gun. She should have met police outside and explained what was really going on. But I don't want to blame her either. It all happened too fast.
The police arrived on the scene to what looked like a rapidly escalating situation. Their lives, they reasonably believed, were in danger. Faced with was looked for all the world like a man with a gun ready to die and take others with them, they did what they had to so they could go home to their families.
It is a regrettable situation, but it is wrong to accuse the police of overdoing it. Only in movies do police have clear-cut situations where they know all the facts of a situation and have obvious choices to make in order to resolve an issue.
God's peace to the family of the deceased, and His peace on the hearts of the people in uniform that brought him down believing it was the right thing to do.
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CNN International article
Newsday article
I have heard many news stories on this the last few days. The one that concerned me was the call for a "less than friendly" march upon the city hall to protest the "abuse of the African-American".
ReplyDeleteI might get smacked for saying this, but that's a little ridiculous. The guy was carrying a hair brush, screaming that it was a gun, what did he expect? This was suicide by cop.
I like your point about movies. In a media saturated world people tend to forget that reality very seldom resembles what's on TV. In real life, people who wave around hairbrushes like they are guns get shot, not talked to.