Unresponsive male in vehicle at a Taco Bell drive thru is confronted by several police with guns drawn who notice a gun in the vehicle when checking on the passed out driver. Driver moves slightly and cops fire a tremendous volley raining down at 25 shots that struck the victim. Death was obviously certain. The police say they were fearful for their lives from a sleeping man with a gun. Is this this what a gun culture cultivates as a police responsive. There’s so many guns out there that the police are in constant fear and must shoot first like this? Is there a racial element here? Would events played out differently if the victim was of a different background? Is there any culpability on the part of the police?
The footage has been cut and the portion that activated the police to shoot has been removed. I have to interpret that as, it made the cops response to this incident look even worse.
The police department itself released the full video. They would release a video and edit in a manner to make themselves look bad??? Not sure how they could look worse than they do surrounding a car with a sleeping man with at most one bullet (determined to have none) and pumped him full of 25 rounds.
This doesn’t look good. There are gaps in the video (about 2 minutes at one point) that didn’t seem to change anything. The police were still in their same positions. I wish I could have heard at least one, “Wake up” or knock on the window.
It seems like they were just waiting for him to wake up or move with no plan (other than shooting) to contain the situation.
Particularly in this case. According to the Taco Bell employee, several patrons went out and knocked on the window and tried to wake him. Presumably, they saw the same thing as the cops, yet they attempted to wake the guy… without shooting him in the face.
But we’ve seen this a thousand time already. They’ll give the tried and true “feared for my life defense” and walk. Like every damn time…
Right? Don’t get me wrong, Im not hating on all cops here… fully recognize they’re overwhelmingly a benefit to society. But these sort of incidents continue to happen far too frequently. Why do they have a policy of shoot to kill at even the slightest suspicion that the guy is only moving? It’s insane. Yes, people will say “because their lives are at risk”. Well, no ■■■■■■ If you can’t deal with being in a profession that inherently puts you in situations where you’re at an increased chance of being injured/killed, then you shouldn’t be looking for employment with the local PD. We shouldnt continue to allow this tired excuse of “I feared for my life”… because honestly, in that line of work, I’d expect that to happen occasionally, it goes hand in hand with the job.
Well said. And there are true heroes among cops. There’s one in my town. One in every town. Hopefully many more. The rotten apples are hard to get rid of though.
If you come home and a man is robbing your home. He has a knife and comes toward you and you have a gun. Do you stand there and wait to see if he is going to run by you out the door or do you use your gun and stop him before he gets to you?
How is this remotely relevant to this situation? For your example to be remotely relevant, it would involve a homeowner coming home to find a burglar asleep on his couch… and only after his neighbors already came in, banged on the door and told the burglar “Hey dude, this ain’t your home”.
How do you know what threat they saw.
Do you think that when they think their lives are in danger that they should not defend themselves? Should they just stand there and let someone shoot themselves or someone else? Because you know the guy might not of been going to shoot he might have just been getting out of the car and was going to drop the gun on the ground.
Just like me you have no idea what they saw or felt. We have never been in their shoes. Are there a few bad cops? Sure. But the majority of them are just men and women doing a job that I know I would not want to do.
I know what I saw on body cams. Ya know, standing outside the window of a guy asleep at the wheel, apparently having a gun on his lap. I say apparently because it seems other civilians went to his car and knocked on his window to try and wake him, but there never appeared to be any of them reporting seeing a gun. At any rate, they stood there for approximately 5 minutes, not really indicative of feeling like your life is in imminent danger, IMO.
Of course cops should defend themselves. But what’s the argument for “defending” yourself against a guy that’s asleep? A person sees a person asleep and feels they have a reason to feel in danger? ■■■?!
My point was that apparently unarmed civilians felt safe enough to approach this guy and attempt to wake him; the cops couldn’t do it without shooting him in the face. If they feel the need to react in that manner to that type of situation, then they have no business being cops, or put in a position of “protecting” the general public.
I know its not necessarily a safe assumption, but it struck me as odd that no one else reported seeing a gun in his lap… not saying it wasn’t there, just seemed odd.
