I have mixed feelings about this one. Hindsight is 20-20 and I’m sure if this police officer could have watched the tape while sitting safely in a chair in a courtroom like the jurors are, he’d have made a different decision about shooting. But the reality is that an awful lot of police officers get shot during traffic stops, and quite a few of those get killed. They want to get home to their families alive just like everybody else. And when a driver leads you on a high speed chase, and you have to make split second life-and-death decisions about the intentions of his passenger, you’re likely to make the not-unreasonable assumption that there’s a better than even chance they’re two peas in a pod.
Obviously this vet shouldn’t have been shot, but what the heck was he doing riding in a car driven by the sort of low-life who leads police on high-speed chases? There have been some cases where our soldiers in Iraq have been accused of a criminal act when they shot someone who turned out to be perfectly innocent, but if they had legitimate reason to believe their target was a threat to their own lives and the lives of their fellow soldiers, and only had a split second to think through the evidence pro and con, I’d call their act a tragic mistake, not a crime.
That cop should fry.