<- Have had a knife pulled on me
<- resolved situation with out violence
<- wasn't a 12 year old.

and I'm not sure how the boy could have reacted in the VERY short time from when we saw the the car on the camera, and when the boy was shot. It would have taken a little time to even process what was being said. I don't know how the boy could have handled the situation any different.
What exact danger was this cop deescalate? there was no one else even around...the cop was the only dangerous individual in the footage. The boy was no threat, the cop INCORRECTLY perceived him as a threat, and that's not completely his fault, it's also the fault of the dispatcher.
The cop had far more than two seconds to handle that situation as there was no one else around...It wasn't a hostage situation, it wasn't a school shooting, it was a boy alone in a park with a gun..

If I'm put in a situation where I see a boy playing with a gun alone in the park, I definitely wouldn't shoot him.

If someone broke into my house with a gun, whether it was real or not? Yeah I probably would.

We don't live in a shithole though

inb4 - where were the parents?
Didn't follow this shit, nor am I willing to read the previous pages to find out...

das racist

A knife is far different from a gun.. Keep your distance and you'll be okay. There was plenty of time to drop the gun when you see a cruiser screaming up to you with lights and sirens. I don't know about you, but when I was 12 I could very easily put two and two together... Holding a gun that looks real, in a public park --- police cruiser running up on grass = drop the damn gun and step away from it. You also have to realize that it takes a lot of training to control natural reactions and instincts. The police officer was also a rookie, however I stand firm in my belief that the child was in the wrong, and if he knew enough to take the orange indicator cap off the tip, he knew enough that it would be suspected as real.

Next you're going to tell me the case in ferguson was wrong on the cops behalf to shot him too?

this is an absolute lose-lose situation for the police involved. One, they act quickly and kill a kid with an airsoft. The alternative is they don't shoot him and it turns out he has a real gun and more people are shot. Yeah that's a what-if but that's how the situation needs to be approached and how cops are TRAINED to approach situations like that. Do cops get it wrong? absolutely they do. In this instance it would have been awesome for any other outcome, but you can't fault the cop for this either. As it is his career is probably over one way or another anyway. Why don't you try living with the guilt of shooting a 12 year old kid with an airsoft, even if you weren't unjustified in your response based on the information you had at the time.

as bad as it is the real issue to me isn't even a cop shooting a 12 year old. The real issue here is why in the flying fuck did their parents let their son have an airsoft with the orange plastic end removed AND let him walk around the park by himself waving it around.... of course someone is going to think it's a real fucking gun.

Parenting at its finest right here. If the parents thought for half a damn second about what they were letting their child do, either directly, or indirectly through lack of supervision, this wouldn't have happened.

In hindsight it's real easy to say that the officer reacted to quickly, but the bottom line is he made a split second judgement based on the information he had at the time. Would 1 more second delay have changed his mind? I doubt it.

I was about 15 feet away from 3 guys, keeping my distance was much easier said than done. I think like most people, when they see police lights coming at them, they feel anxiety, maybe he froze up. Or maybe he didn't even know what the big deal was. What do you think his intentions were? To shoot the cop with his toy gun?
From the looks of the video he may have had a few seconds from the car getting on the grass and him being dead. Probably 5 seconds, 10 max..



I don't know what happened there. We only have the cops word.
But why are you so angry that i disagree with you? we don't have to agree on what we believe the role of a police officer should be.

Not angry at all, just expressing my view point. It's just so quick to point the blame after the fact. The only thing for sure is that a series of events lead to this child's death, and it sucks, but that's life

No, you live in a little princess bubble.