Val Demings: officer who shot Ma'Khia Bryant 'responded as he was trained'

[Tom Rinaldo]

18. Your point is critical and I believe 100% true

Where we may disagree in this instance is that I believe in this case, by any standard, there was a more objective "imminent threat" than exists for the vast majority of police actions involving use of force. Someone in the kinetic act of lunging with a knife can not be deescalated. I do, in this case, belief that a decent police officer of any race would likely have acted similarly against an aggressor of any race in that split second.

Having said that up front I want to support and underscore the importance of your core observation. The hard core racist "bad apple" worst of the worst cops will use force simply because they can and want to, and then retroactively (falsely) claim that they thought there was some "imminent threat" that justified their actions. Far more frequently, I think, are cases where white cops project their fears and prejudices onto black males, building them up to menacing proportions in their mind and then acting upon their projected fear as though it were objective reality. In other words, they may actually emotionally experience an "imminent threat" that in fact is neither imminent nor a threat. And you are right, "a few hours of training at the Academy won't fix that."