moment.

I think that's the most damning part of this video.

I went back and watched after I made my prior post, and the cop shows no urgency at all while he sees two girls come running, even after Ma'Kiah absolutely trucks the first girl.

No need to draw at that point- but physically stepping in to intervene or subdue the attacker, who was Ma'Khia, would have sufficed.

This is where he had a chance to do something. Anything at all.

Then he draws, and yells "get down, get down, get down".

Not to a specific person.
No command to drop the knife.

But he DID have time to yell "hey, hey, hey, get down, get down, get down".

So to the questions of, when did he have time to shout a command or what have you, that was the time. And he used it to yell "hey, get down" multiple times. Not DROP THE WEAPON! Not STOP POLICE.

Not any number of things that could have potentially stopped her in her tracks.

When he says "get down", he'd already drawn his weapon. So at that point he intended to use his weapon. And the words were, "get down". The interpretation I see here is, he's telling people around Ma'Khia to get down. He'd already decided to shoot.

Sounds like he's telling everyone to get down.

So we can disregard any notion that he had no time and no ability to do anything but shoot her.

Let's choose to be extremely charitable to the officer, and say that he, in that moment, chose to shoot Ma'Khia solely to save the life of the woman in pink.

Cool. He saved a life.

Again, that's a very charitable take.

The issue here is, his actions/inaction up to that point, helped that moment arrive.

And it's clear that he had time to shout clear commands before he shot.

It's clear that he had a moment to attempt to physically intervene prior to that. So even in a take that's charitable toward the shooting itself, we still arrive at facts that are decidedly unfavorable toward the office. I wouldn't necessarily say he was negligent, but he absolutely failed to yell anything resembling a clear command. He failed to exert any real effort to contain the situation.

What he did, frankly, was panic. He was not in control of even himself. And we can be charitable and take a right wing talking point and say, well, they're human, and you're not in that situation, etc.

And, being charitable with that, it still begs the question:

What's the point of training, in that case?
Was he even trained for situations like this?
What did that training consists of?

Because this doesn't look like training kicking in.

This looks like "HOLYSHITWHATDOIDOWHATDOIDOFUCKMEWHATDOIDO?"

Being charitable, the best possible light here is that this particular officer was completely unfit for this sort of moment.

The reason I took the approach of being charitable here, is to see what this looks like when we grant the officer a few caveats. For me, that still results in a very bad look for the officer.

And if we grant those caveats and he still looks, at best, simply incompetent, I think that's enough to shut the door of most, if not all of those arguments that say he did the right thing.