The Kajieme Powell shooting, on camera

He was most certainly moving toward them when the guns were fired. He seemed to be about to back off but then walked along the small curb/wall toward the officer on the left. It could have been handled in a different way, and I do feel bad that this obviously mentally ill man is dead, but I don't blame the officers at all. This is what they are trained to do when presented with a potentially deadly situation. You can say that this man could not have injured the officer from that distance, but you would be wrong.

 

How close were they supposed to let him get?

 

So is your position that it doesn't exist because you can't see it? Because I'm pretty sure you didn't see the bullets, either.

 

No, Ferguson wasn't unique in that regard. The reaction to Ferguson is much more notable.

Since this isn't a world governed by the unbending logic of a child declaring uniform behavior out of his stuffed animals, variables and shit are involved.

 

I don't see this death as a failure of those two cops. I see it as a cumulative failure of three decades of policies -- usually tied to the "war on drugs" or a politician needing to be "tough on crime" -- that may been enacted with good intentions, but have become disasters.

The deceased wasn't a person. He was a "threat." That is, a threat to others, which the police were nominally protecting, by immediately pointing their guns at him, and later a threat to the police themselves.

Would we prefer they put down their guns and risk getting a wound to disarm the guy? Maybe. Would we prefer they get in back in the car and try to talk the guy down? Maybe. But they'd get in more trouble for doing that than they would have doing what they did. And what if they didn't disarm the guy, and a single tooth of that knife grazed, even superficially, the arm of an innocent bystander? That's a million-dollar lawsuit. That's the end of those guys' careers. And what if that knife found its way into a child? That's a national outrage.

It's fine mess, that we're into.

 

Well said

 

Agree the war on drugs is nowhere near a success. If that's the case, how will a war on guns (making guns illegal) solve the gun problem.

 

Who is suggesting that? I don't think you'll find many people who think the war on drugs is a success. And I think you'll find about as many people who want guns made illegal.

 

How has the War on Poverty worked out?

 

It would work out a lot better if people stopped having children at an inverse proportion to their income.

 

It was junked in the 1980s for the broad agenda of the folks who worked under Reagan.

 

I don't blame individual officers. This is how they are trained and this is what they are told to do. But we have a "police shooting people" problem in this country and broad solutions would be useful.