In any event, these cops need to be sent back to the minors for some seasoning.
Well, fair is fair. In this case, at first they were doing what they were supposed to be doing. And I will admit, chasing possibly armed burglars at 2am would tend to make a lot of people jumpy.
Their errors were tactical ones, and being trigger happy. This shows less malevolence than just poor training and lack of experience.
Before the mid-1970s, police were trained with “Old West”-style tactics, which are a lot calmer, and guns are used with the assumption that if a policeman takes his out of his holster, somebody is going to be shot.
This was replaced with “SWAT”-style tactics, that has gotten a lot more people wounded and killed, including police officers. It has the concept that guns are used to establish dominance and control, which is a fundamentally flawed idea, and violates the old rule that “Guns cannot make a bad situation better, but they can make an okay situation worse.”
Police soon realized that brandishing a gun often is of no help at all, because guns only have three modes: holstered, brandished, and firing (and the forth mode, dropping it or having it taken away from you). This is not enough to deal with most situations, which is why many police adore Tasers, because they give the them more alternatives.
So, all told, in this particular case, the police department needs to pay the wounded man a big settlement, then send the two cops to get some better training under a senior cop with years of experience under his belt.