OK, a SC State Trooper shot a man in a gas station for reaching for his wallet.
There was a LEO who shot a social worker sitting on the ground with his hands and feet raised in the air.
In DeKalb county Georgia a officer shot an unarmed naked man.
Mistakes or intentional acts, the body count is rising.
The SC troopers major fault was being incompetent. The trooper pulled a young black man over as he was pulling into a gas station, and the black man was getting out to fuel his car before the trooper had even come to a stop.
At that point the trooper asked if the driver had a license, then asked him to get it. The soon to be victim complied by reaching into his vehicle and coming back out with his wallet, which prompted the trooper to shoot from about 5 yards, hitting the victim once and skipping the other two shots around the gas station.
This situation was even more egregious as the victim was wearing shorts with no pockets and it was reasonable to assume he did not in fact have the license on his person but rather in his vehicle. Thus the officer's assumption that he was reaching into the car for a weapon wasn't as reasonable as it should have been.
Details matter and it should have went a lot more like this:
Officer: Do you have a drivers license?
Motorist: Yes.
Officer: Where it is located?
Motorist: It's in my wallet.
Officer: Do you have your wallet on your person?
Motorist: No, it's on the passenger's seat in my car.
Officer: I need you to slowly reach into your car, and retrieve your wallet and I need you to continue to move slowly once you have it, so that I can verify you don't have a weapon in your hands. Please retrieve your wallet now.
The difference is that while in both cases the motorist is fully complying with the officer's request, when the officer doesn't not make unwarranted assumptions and is more specific about how the motorist needs to go about producing his VDL, no one gets shot in a mistake of fact shooting.
And mistake or fact or not, this trooper lost his job for his contribution in creating the mistake of fact situation.
I'll argue there was possibly a training gap, and I'll also argue that this officer was probably a bit too excitable for law enforcement work in the first place, but shootings like this are all too common.
In another shooting a few years ago a mother called the police for assistance in getting her son (who had schizophrenia) to be med compliant. After the officers arrived, the mother walked out the front door with her son behind her. He was not agitated but he was twirling a screw driver between his hands. The lead officer immediately yelled "Drop the weapon!" and when the individual did not comply shot and killed him - all within about 3 seconds of the mother coming out of the door.
The problem there was that while the presence of a "weapon" and the individual's refusal to drop it may have met a minimum legal standard to shoot, there was in fact no need for the use of deadly force.
The individual was calm, his mother clearly felt no threat was present, even if he was not med compliant that day the meds are persistent in his system, and even if he did pose a reasonable threat they officers had plenty of space available to defuse and de-escalate the situation. Instead, they escalated it a deadly force situation in 3 seconds.
I have heard that at least one of the officers was "trained" to interact with mentally ill suspects, but the short courses that often serve to make an officer an "expert" in an area like this are insufficient to impart any real expertise and seldom over come an attitude of "what ever it take to get home tonight" or "it's us against the civilians".
Until we do a better job of truly professionalizing law enforcement and paying officers what is needed to attract and then retain the best and brightest, we will continue to have these kinds of failures in police procedure.
