This person has written a longer explanation of that tweet in the Washington Examiner basically insisting that the shooting was justified because the victim had a taser.
I know you will see the terrible irony of the fact that cops use tasers on unarmed people every single day, often while they are already in custody. Sometimes, people do die and it’s almost always because they are shot repeatedly at very close range, usually as they’re being held down. But the police never acknowledge any of this. In fact, they insist that tasering is perfectly safe.
Here you have someone saying that Rayshard Brooks was armed with a taser and the cop shot him in self-defense.
Keep in mind that this officer also had a taser in his hand. (He’s not the one from whom Brooks took the one he had.) But he switched to the deadly weapon when Brooks turned around with the taser. You know, the non-lethal weapon police use every single day.
Perhaps people forget this, but police are not allowed to kill people except in self-defense. They can’t kill people who are running away, people who fail to comply with their orders, people who mouth off or are uncooperative. They are no different than any other American: the only justifiable homicide is in self-defense.
And yes, there is this idea that if a reasonable person would “feel” his life is in danger he or she can kill someone — and cops are given way too much latitude in that regard. (A lot of the “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws rely on this.)
But there can be no saying in this situation that this police officer mistook that taser for a real gun as we’ve seen in some other famous cases. He knew what Brooks had in his hand and he knew very well it was not a lethal threat to him.
He had no reason to grab his gun, much less fire it. But he did.