I have little doubt that if they hadn’t been here now that they would have been here eventually.
The bullet could have passed through the suspect and struck the manager.
More likely is that the officer was experiencing extreme tunnel vision where the only thing he could really see was the suspect in the stress of the situation. Officers are supposed to be aware of this problem, but when the adrenaline gets dumped into the system millions of years of evolution take over and he was focused on the primary threat.
South Whitehall Township, PA (right outside Allentown) right across the street from popular Dorney Park.
Cops respond to reports of an obviously disturbed man riding on and attacking cars. South Whitehall cop shows up, confronts dark skinned perpetrator who is clearly unarmed and after disobeying his orders instead of tasering him or calling for backup the cop puts 5 nuggets into him:
If I knew someone had mental health issues and was merely disturbing people but not posing a deadly or physical threat to anyone, I wouldn’t want to be the one to call the police. I wouldn’t want that on my conscience.
I believe this was the exact reason a guy who was concealed carrying at one of the CA school shootings didn’t draw his weapon - no way for responding police to know if you are a good guy with a gun, or a bad guy with a gun. Can’t see any way that the police won’t be found non-culpable here.
I can see how it would be very sensible if I were carrying in such a situation, to seek cover or a defensible position and only engage the threat IF it comes my way, rather than head out to attempt an intercept so that now there are TWO gunmen running around.
Seems in the case of the homeowner, he probably was not sure if that one intruder was all there were, and while still clearing the house it happens just then the police come in and they stumble on each other guns drawn.
I guess their claim was true, to a certain degree. But didn’t LE in that area, blast a guy on his porch whose crime was that he wouldn’t drop the nozzle off a garden hose sprayer? And didn’t they shoot the living shit out of two separate truck loads of people when they were hunting for Christopher Dorner? Who looked nothing like Dorner, nor his vehicle, by the way.
Police are not incentivized to be prudent when it comes using deadly force. They likely won’t be fired if they can articulate some threat to their life, piercing their qualified immunity so that they can be civilly sued is incredibly difficult, and don’t make me laugh at the thought of actually criminally charging and convicting them.
Whereas, the guy they’re trying to shoot, is often a fleeing violent felon who may be firing back at them. Taking their time to ‘make every shot count’ may result in the bad guy shooting them. Fuck that. If they instead mag dump at the guy, (and sympathetic firing happens like I’m sure happened in Snowboarder’s cite.), then they can get a better chance of hitting the guy with something, and the ill effects from missed bullets probably won’t affect them. Unlike if you or I just started blasting away at someone and an innocent person catches a bullet.
So we end up with a police force that often resembles the cops from Idiocracy.
For the instance that Snowboarder mentions, I’ve read that the cops were initially reticent to shoot the knife-wielder, when they had every reason to. Precisely because they didn’t want the heat from killing a guy (Hispanic to boot) just because he had a knife and wasn’t listening to their commands. Of course, by the time he was sawing on someone with the knife, it’s often too late to try and stop him before he could do serious damage to his victim. Good luck getting a one shot stop on his head with a handgun from 20 feet. And as before, magazine dumping at the general area of the guy means the hostage caught a few shots too.
