What is the vernacular? “I’d hit that.” ?
You need to work on your phrasing. You can’t use active voice when describing police malfeasance! It should be something like:
“Woman found in trunk after encounter with police cruiser.”
Just like how if a cop shoots someone because they twitched wrong during a traffic stop it’s all “Man dies after officer-involved shooting,” or the famous initial press release in the Floyd case “Man dies after medical incident during police interaction.”
I would like to point out that the nurse was male.
Nothing like a little inherent sexism to ruin the mood, is there? 
Guilty.
And I actually read the article.
Hey, Damian could be a female name, like Terry or Taylor or Ashleigh or Drew. The girls keep stealing boys’ names. The article never used a gendered noun or pronoun.
It doesn’t look to be paywalled, but the disabled man was accused of stealing a toolbox and threatening someone with a knife before driving his motorized wheelchair across a parking lot to a Lowe’s at which time Officer Asshole shot him in the back 9 times and then handcuffed the dead body. Of course Officer Asshole couldn’t shoot him in the parking lot, he had to do it in rather large store that usually has lots of innocent people to be hit by fucking friendly fire.
It’s possible I’m a little pissed off ATM, please excuse my language.
Hey, maybe one of the pro-death types can come in and explain a) how Officer Asshole was totally afraid and 2. that really wasn’t a “shooting” since those are done by criminals not by cops, etc.
Yikes; have we missed this story before?
Actually, he shot him outside the entrance to Lowe’s, and I imagine that all the people inside are exactly the reason he shot him. Here’s the headline in the officer’s head at the time:
Officer stops armed robber fleeing scene before he can enter crowded store.
Here are important points I actually believe:
- If the officer is justified to shoot the man once, he’s justified to shoot him 9 times. The goal is to stop the threat. As always, the number of shots is pretty much irrelevant to whether a shooting was justified or not.
- From the video it appears the officer shot parallel to the front door of the store, presenting minimal threat to the people inside. Ignoring for the moment whether the shooting was justified, he actually handled that part of it quite well.
- It is appropriate for police to use force, including deadly force, to protect other people.
- Just because somebody has been shot doesn’t mean he magically stops being a threat. When a police officer shoots somebody, it makes sense for him to apply handcuffs.
Here are some facts that at least partially justify the shooting:
- A knife is a dangerous weapon, and can be deadly
- The man has already threatened a store worker with the knife
- Being in a wheelchair does not necessarily mean the man can’t walk, leap, run, etc.
- It’s much harder to safely (for police and bystanders) control a situation indoors than outdoors
Taken together, and viewed from this perspective, you can construct a fairly compelling narrative for why the shooting was justified in the moment of the shooting: An armed suspect who had already assaulted (i.e. threatened) one person was about to enter a populated interior.
The problem, as is so often the case, with this narrative is all the things the police didn’t do.
- They showed a complete lack of creativity in finding a way to stop a man slowly rolling across a parking lot.
- He likely didn’t accurately judge the threat a knife in a wheelchair presented in a store
- Surely there were some shopping carts they could have pushed into his way.
- There was a store worker standing just inside the Lowe’s, but they didn’t try shouting, “Close the door. Close the door. He’s got a knife.”
- They didn’t try grabbing something, anything, and stick it under his wheels.
- The officer had a tazer, but stated that he couldn’t use it because the back of the chair was in the way. Fair enough, in the last moment. But you couldn’t get ahead of him at any time crossing the parking lot so as to use it?
This officer made, at minimum, a terrible error of judgement. He should never work in law enforcement again. Should he spend time in jail? Probably. But let’s be sure to clearly understand the problem before offering a solution.
9 bullets. Yikes. 1 would have been excessive. 9 was to make certain the guy would die beyond any worldly attempt to resuscitate.
I disagree. The number of bullets does matter as it increases the likelihood of death. If a few bullets stops someone, why add 6 more on top of that? Well, to kill or finish him off.
I think I need to retract this. The video from inside the store makes it look like the angle may have put people inside the store at risk. It’s hard to tell if the shots were safe (to bystanders).
It was in a Lowes parking lot. Of course it was a danger to bystanders.
If only there as a way to disable a wheelchair.
Let me think. I’m just spit-balling here, but maybe someone could have knocked it over? It looks like I could have done that pretty easily and safely.
Maybe they were afraid they were gonna hurt him if they did that and decided to shoot him instead? You know. over and over again?
9 shots mean the officer was firing in a panic or wanted him to die.
or ‘OMG he’s coming right at us???’ Except he was moving away.
I can’t walk across the street without using a cane. I move slowly and carefully. I get impatient when walking behind someone in a motorized wheelchair because those thing are even slower than me.
Too bad the Tucson cops can’t move faster than me, cause I could have stopped the the race by walking past the fleeing criminal and dropping my cane in front of his wheels.
Those motorized wheelchairs are pretty heavy and have a low center of balance, so I wouldn’t have thought about trying to knock it over, but hey, I also carry mace. If he had managed to defeat my cane on the ground, I’ll bet my mace would have made him think twice.
If you had maced him he just would have blindly fired his knife into the crowd until it was out of ammo, possibly injuring or killing thousands of innocent bystanders.
–Loud sigh–
Do you ever get tired of being right all the time? With the exception of that stupid “throw things into the quarry” thing, and the assumption that you think that your cats are cuter than my cats…you are always right.
But now that you have explained it so clearly, it’s perfectly understandable why that poor scared for his life cop shot the armed and fleeing suspect in the back 9 times.
(Lots of sarcasm here) (but my cats are cuter than your cats, so there!)
This is a slight misrepresentation of what happened. The officer was at most 20° back from abreast of the guy in the wheelchair when he started shooting. There can be little doubt that the man knew that the officer was there and was threatening him. To call it shooting him in the back is just not accurate.
But aside from the emptying of the clip, there is another troubling aspect to this. I would not know what to expect if I shot a guy in a powered chair. Police seem to be regularly firing their weapons at moving vehicles, and this needs to end. They shoot into moving cars all the damn time (well, ok, not all the time, but certainly 100% too often) without regard for anyone else who might be affected. Although shooting a guy in an underway powered wheelchair is probably not a serious hazard, it still violates the principle of one should never shoot at/into a moving vehicle. We need to have a zero tolerance for such behavior.
We have footage from his interview with his commanding officer.
Also, I’d be curious to see what would happen to a electric wheelchair if it got hit with a surge of electricity. Sounds like something worth checking out.
The cop was so lazy, he thought it was better to shoot a shoplifter nine times then run in front of him and use his Tazer.