Land of the free
by digby
In case you were wondering, this man was committing a terrible crime:
Outrage has ignited over a helmet-cam video of officers fatally confronting a homeless man at his primitive campsite in the foothills. Video shows the man standing by his meager possessions, surrounded by rifle-toting officers who were citing him for illegally camping without government permission. Officers ultimately tossed a concussion grenade in his face, sicced an attack dog on him, and shot him to death with a flurry of gunfire.
Evidently, at one point he waved around a couple of knives as he stood up there on the hillside so the officers felt their lives were in danger:
Police Chief Gorden Eden released video of the incident during a Friday afternoon news conference. Much of it comes from an officer’s helmet camera. The shooting was justified, Eden said, because Boyd, holding knives, threatened an officer and the use of “less-than-lethal” devices hadn’t worked, he said.
“Do I believe it was a justified shooting? Yes,” Eden told reporters. “If you follow case law … there was a directed threat to an officer.” Boyd had a criminal history going back almost 20 years, Eden said. He had spent time in both the Doña Ana and Bernalillo county jails, the chief said. In one incident, Eden said, Boyd punched and broke an officer’s nose as she talked to him in an Albuquerque library.
“All of his charges have been violent,” Eden told reporters. Officers arriving on scene were told that Boyd had an “extensive history” of violence against police officers, that he was possibly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and that he was a transient.
What choice did they have, really? This mentally ill man was sleeping on public land, an obvious emergency and threat to public safety. Killing him was obviously the only way they could have handled it. Plus, they have better things to do.
.