I wonder what the decision will be on this shooting?
got out of the car after a police chance with a loaded weapon drawn.
How do you know the shotgun was loaded.
How do you “draw” a shotgun?
What was the position of the shotgun’s muzzle when the victim was shot in the back?
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Bad shoot.
Gun out and on target till the guy is disarmed, sure. Shoot a guy in the back holding it up in a manner it’s not a threat? Nope.
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Good shoot. I realize it looks bad on video because we are all safe at our computer but we have the luxury of safety and normal adrenaline. If you think its bad your expecting superhuman reactions from an officer who is severely handicapped at the time of this shooting.
But you have to look at it from a “reasonable officer” standard which is the rule based on Graham vs Connor which is the Supreme Court legal standard. Cop sees him getting out with a gun at the 1:25 mark. At the 1:27 mark the gun is pointed briefly in the direction of the officer. At this point the officer has 100% reasonable belief he is about to be in a gun fight. His adrenaline which would have already been quite high just went astronomical. Adrenaline screws with perception, with thought process, with reaction time, etc. The second that gun came out of the car and pointed his direction his brain would interpret it at life or death. He shoots the guy at 1:30 just three seconds later. That seems long when sitting at your computer but in life or death with maxed adrenaline its nothing and he wouldn’t even have realized the situation had changed as he was 100% in shoot to save his life mode. It would require superhuman reaction and reflexes beyond human capability under maximum stress for him to react otherwise.
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Muzzle pointed straight up.
Victim’s left hand is holding the shotgun by the pump, no where near the trigger.
Victims right hand is up in the air.
Victims back is to the officer when he is shot.
Bad shoot.
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So, Adrenaline works as a defense here but not in the case of Arbery. Not saying you, but others on this forum suggests Arbery should have thought it through and not attacked his attacker. This looks like another coward cop, shooting before thinking.
I wouldn’t necessarily say cowardly, just poorly trained.
Not sure where this happened, but my Department had “shoot/don’t shoot” drills for the deputies on a regular basis.
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Always assume the gun is loaded, never point a gun at anything you don’t want to kill.
The guy was about to walk out of the line of sight of the officer. Can’t let that happen.
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Dammit, and here I went all week without seeing someone get murdered by an idiot. lol
You’re one hundred percent off.
Time slows down when your adrenaline hits in a life or death situation.
Those 3 seconds would have been a long time. Which leaves two options.
There was no Adrenalin dump and he chose to shoot anyways, or he was seeing so much red that he didn’t care.
Neither indicate a good defense.
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That’s a tough one. He never appeared to threaten the cop with the weapon. But he did brandish it after a high speed chase. I don’t think I would charge the cop. But I probably would fire him for being panicky and trigger happy. I would have liked to hear the audio,
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Shooting a kid in a park with a toy gun justifiable though
There’s no such thing as a toy gun when pointed at a cop. If it’s black or silver, it’s real. Bad argument.
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Who said it was justified?
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What the hell. The guy gets out of the car carrying a…SHOTGUN! Granted…he turned away from the officer and lazily put his hands in the air but…from that position…all that could change quickly. There’s no audible so I can’t hear if the perp is defying orders. The actual shot appears to be done at a time when the threat was actually being reduced but…the actions of the perp…make no sense what so ever. This is more of a gray area confrontation and I’m going to have to give this one to the officer. The factors IMO are that egregious.
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I’ve been shot at. I’ve also had to shoot someone. They weren’t the same incident (in the shooting he was armed but not with a gun). So I have first hand experience in this.
It can go either way. In one of them time sped up and it was all chaos in my head. In the other, where I was being shot at I said in the interview afterwards that it felt like 10 minutes but turns out it was only 55 seconds.
If you go back in the Arbery thread you’ll see in my first post on the matter there I said it was clear cut 1st degree homicide. They hunted him down and illegally detained him with weapons. Arbery 100% was in a fight or flight situation at that point but he had nowhere to flee so he had to fight. Absolutely the right thing in his case to do as a reasonable person in his shoes would know he has nowhere to run and his only chance is to disarm the thug with the gun.
What I’m saying is that what seems like a lifetime to us watching this video from the comfort of our computer chairs is actually only 3 seconds. Its been shown in studies of shootings (many of them done in controlled environments on a range) that when your adrenaline maxes out that it can take several seconds for your brain to perceive what happened and react. The officer was in a pursuit (high adrenaline) and then sees the guy come out with a gun which does swing his direction for a instant. The officer at that point would have absolute belief based on totality of the circumstances that he was going to be shot at and would have decided to shoot to save his life. Absolute adrenaline to the max. So now his focus is on drawing the gun, aiming, and firing. As this is happening the bad guy turns. However its going to take a couple of seconds for the officers brain to perceive this and react but meanwhile his body is doing what he’s trained it to do which is fire. By the time the officer can actively realize whats happened he has already fired.
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Now just so people can see I’m not just pulling stuff out of my rear end. There have been countless studies done on police shootings.
Here is one about why cops shoot so many times and sometimes shoot people in the back. It talks about some of the same things I’ve brought up in regards to decision making and the ability of the brain to perceive a change in whats happened and then get the body to stop. In a study at Johns Hopkinds in a controlled environment, aka normal adrenaline, they had officers on a firing line shooting bullets as fast as they could and they had to stop shooting when a simple stimulus was introduced. The found that most took .7 seconds to 1.5 seconds to stop shooting during which some fired as many as six more rounds. Thats how long it took for their brains to perceive the change in circumstances and get their body to react and this was under no stress and no adrenaline.
Now consider the officer in this case where his adrenaline is maxed as high as it can go. Its going to take much longer for his brain to perceive and react.
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