Columbus, OH police officer fatally shoots 15 year old Black girl

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It's tough to criticize a split-second decision, but it would have been better for the officer to follow President Biden's suggestion to shoot in the leg.

That was an ignorant comment from Biden and wouldn't be applicable in this case. Even an Olympic sharpshooter would have difficulty hitting a leg on a moving person in the split second time available like in that video. That's a movie trope, not a realistic thing.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

The officer is not a telepath. He came and in literally 5 seconds saw a girl trying to stab another girl with a god damn knife. De-escalate?

Could he use other means? May be, he could, but the trade-off would be a higher chance of the girl in pink to being stabbed.

https://www.npr.org/2019/06/27/729922975/despite-widespread-use-police-rate-tasers-as-less-effective-than-believed

The officer also knew why he was there though, which we don't know all the details. It's quite possibly that he was responding to an abusive situation (which is why the girl called the police in the first place) and that would make sense why there was so much activity as soon as he got there. So his response to this situation is to just shoot her 4 times? *FOUR* times? When she was the one being abused, allegedly, before he got there, and she was the one who called in the first place?

For all we know the girl in the pink was abusing her and she fought back.

The girl in the pink appears at the start of the video before the girl with the knife rushes into the scene. We then see her chase another girl who that guy kicks in the head when she's on the ground and then lunges with the knife toward the girl in the pink. Hard to claim self defense when the girl in the pink was already quite a distance from her before she chased in and lunged at her. Even if she was abused by the girl in the pink earlier that doesn't give her the right to chase her down and stab her once she's no longer a threat. Indo.t know the exact details of Ohio law on this but even a "stand your ground" law doesn't allow that, that merely eliminates the "duty to retreat" instead of creating a right to chase.

Still a very sad and unfortunate situation all around.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This could probably have been solved in a different manner, by some warning shots from the police officer instead of outright killing her.

By the time it would take to shoot a warning shot the girl in the pink would already be stabbed.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This could probably have been solved in a different manner, by some warning shots from the police officer instead of outright killing her.

By the time it would take to shoot a warning shot the girl in the pink would already be stabbed.

That’s absurd.

People don’t always die because of a stab wound, certainly not from a 16-year old girl half-heartedly trying to stab another girl.

In the best case, both of them would be alive now, just with the difference that the other girl might have needed a few stitches ...

A stab to the throat can kill almost instantly, and even elsewhere there's no guarantee that the victim wouldn't bleed out before medical help could arrive. And even that's assuming it's only a single stab wound.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

It's tough to criticize a split-second decision, but it would have been better for the officer to follow President Biden's suggestion to shoot in the leg.

That was an ignorant comment from Biden and wouldn't be applicable in this case. Even an Olympic sharpshooter would have difficulty hitting a leg on a moving person in the split second time available like in that video. That's a movie trope, not a realistic thing.

I agree this is not a great case to make a stand over, but her backside/thighs are as big of a target as her chest in that video.

Dude.

What? Someone would have to be quite unusually proportioned for their non-lethal areas to be a smaller target than their heart area.

There's nothing wrong with a policy of "try to shoot non-lethally" as long as people take into consideration that that's not always possible, especially in a split-seconds-matter context.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-trained-shoot-wound-experts/story?id=40402933

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

This case certainly was a trickier situation for the cop than first reports indicated. Still, why is the first option shoot to kill? Where is using the stun gun? Where is shooting the foot/leg rather than in the chest?

This has already been covered multiple times in this thread. A taser isn't guaranteed to be effective enough at that range and shooting at the leg/foot isn't something police are trained to do (anywhere in the world. Not just the US.) and isn't really a feasible thing to train people on, it's movie stuff. I'll repost this: https://abcnews.go.com/US/police-trained-shoot-wound-experts/story?id=40402933

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

There's also the case of Daniel Shaver, probably one of the absolute worst cases of a police killing ever, up there with George Floyd, it was practically a summary execution and should be way more well known and probably would be if Shaver wasn't white. In fact as a case it's even worse than George Floyd because George Floyd's killer was convicted while in this case not only was the officer acquitted the taxpayers get to keep paying his pension and treatment for PTSD from the incident (also the horrific bodycam video of it wasn't admitted as evidence in trial, no doubt the reason for the acquital...a totally disgusting miscarriage of justice.)