General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: I fully understand that this post is likely to draw very intense personal criticism but, at my age, [View all]StarfishSaver
(18,486 posts)The point of ordering someone to put their hands in the air is so you can see their hands and know they aren't armed and, I'd they so still have the gun, they can't easily use it against you or anyone else. It gives the officer time to assess the situation and determine whether the person is still a threat.
The act of putting one's hands in the air is an act of surrender.
There is NO excuse for an officer to shoot someone they've ordered to put up their hands less than a second after they complied. None. It doesn't matter what he had in his hand before he put his hands up or how he disposed of it. When he put up his hands, the situation shifted to new ground and the officer was duty bound to reassess the circumstances he was facing.
I'm tired of the excuses for the inexcusable. I'm sick of the wack-a-mole efforts apologist make to shift blame for these killings from the cop to the victim.
Usually the excuse is "if he'd just complied, he wouldn't have been shot." But a video showing a child being shot point blank with his hands in the air has screwed up that tired excuse. So the new excuse is "he may have complied, but let's look at what he did BEFORE he complied to find an excuse to blame him for getting shot."
BS. The cop shouldn't have shot him. PERIOD.