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Originally Posted by willravel
The kid didn't need to die and this is a terrible tragety. Either way, a 13 year old boy won't have a chance at life. That's the important part. Everything else is semantics.
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Please, the kid had his chance at life, and he fucked it up. No one made his dumb ass steal that car or try to run down police officers. If you want to play with the big boys, you have to be willing to face the consequences.
The biggest problem I see here is all the assumptions. No one here knows what ACTUALLY happened. All we hear is second or third or fourth hand information. Were the cops in or out of the cruiser? I don't know, do you have a report stating if they were? If I was in the officer's shoes, and was outside the car when the kid backed up towards me, I would have fired as well.
If it happened like KMA said it did, with the kid ramming the cruiser twice, then pulling up parallel, I would have shot. It was dark, I highly doubt that in the fleeting amount of time, that the cop could have seen what the kid was doing. Were the windows tinted? That would have added to the uncertainty of the situation.
This sure doesn't sound like a trigger happy cop to me. Does he have a past history of blowing away suspects? If he did, I'm willing to bet the news article would have mentioned it. It sounds to me like this guy was scared shitless by this situation that he didn't want, but had to handle anyway.
If you people want to demonize some cops, I know a couple assholes that work here in the Denver PD. A year or two back, there was a retarded boy who was menacing his family with a knife. It was in the middle of the afternoon. By the time the cops got there, he was out on the front yard. One of the cops shot him to death. Mind you, the kid wasn't charging or attacking anyone, he was just being obstinate, and wouldn't put down the knife. The cop didn't try to use pepper spray or a taser first. He just blew the kid away. It was his second kill as well, and if I remember, he had been on the force for only a couple years. Now THAT'S a trigger happy cop.
Or the brother of the guy the cops were looking for being shot to death in his bed because he had a soda can in his hand. Or the no knock raid a few years back, on the wrong house, that ended up with the home owner being killed because he pulled out a shotgun to defend himself from armed intruders breaking into his house.
All of those cops are dickheads. But this guy doesn't sound like that to me.