Not the first time this has happened. But then what should the police do if they're told that someone is waving a gun around? Is there any easy solution:
After watching the video it'd be hard to say they were fully justified but they fully believed he had a gun by the actions the idiot did. When someone calls and says that someone is pointing a gun that looks like they are firing at people in a public place police don't have time to sort out if it's a cell phone or not After watching the video the moron acted just like he had a gun and was firing it. Were they fully justified? It appears they might have jumped the gun but the guy is an absolute idiot and I don't have an ounce of sympathy for things like that
This comment is very bad dark humor but it was the first thought I had when I read the OP title. Now, full disclosure, I have not watched the video..... So here goes: Tomatoes, pineapples, etc, can be very dangerous fruit and sometimes, depending on who's involved, may require violence means to combat the fruit threat! A cell phone might be worse that certain fruit?
OK, now I've watched the video, pretty glad that the man shot survived. My two cents, the police over reacted but they were also clearly told that the man was armed with a gun and was also shooting(?) unless I'm mistaken(?)......I'm not a cop but I'd be somewhat 'jacked-up' responding to this call given what I heard on the radio.
This is a difficult one to call. On one hand, one would hope that LEOs can distinguish the difference between a phone and a handgun however they were repeatedly told from different sources to expect an armed man shooting a handgun. Additionally, the victim in this case was holding the phone as one would hold a handgun. Even though the victim turned out to be unarmed, I cannot fault the LEOs for the split second decision they had to make. Let's hope that the victim has a quick recovery and has learned to hold his phone a little differently next time.
There's only two options: Either we train cops to shoot percieved threats as quickly as possible to protect themselves and they shoot more of us on accident, or we train cops to hesitate while they assess the situation and more of them get injured and killed as a result. If we keep trying to pretend there's a perfect solution where no one gets hurt, we'll keep being disappointed with the results ...and with cops.
