Wow, okay. I'm pretty liberal about the amount of force a cop should be able to use in this situation. This is going to sound insensitive, but they should've been given freedom, for lack of a better word, to shoot to kill imo.
That said, those last 2-4 rounds are well after the guy has fallen to the ground. Especially the last two. Just way excessive imo.
Now, based on the state of mind of the officers, their adrenaline, the victim's criminal history if he has one, his bio (could be schizo or something based on some of the nutty **** he was saying), things of that nature, I'm not sure you could or should charge these cops with murder or the like. Maybe. That's a tough call. I think I'd lean toward no, though. But as the Chief of Police of St. Louis, I would be thinking long and hard about suspending these cops indefinitely, probably with pay. And a firing isn't out of the question.
If I'm these cops, I would be fearing for me and my family's life for eternity.
Basically for me, it's excessive but I can rationalize it and therefore don't find it criminal.
This is where I think the body cam would play a role. When the guy went down he looked at first like he stumbled. From the perspective of the cop closest to him it may have appeared the guy was lunging at him, which would heighten the tension and cause him to squeeze off 2 more rounds easily without thinking about it.
Just for fun, for lack of a better term, I was able to talk to a friend of mine in the Sparks police department this morning who I know has been involved in a fatal shooting before (he used to be a cop in L.A., rarely do cops in Reno or Sparks have to draw like that) and he told me that he hadn't seen the footage but that if a perpetrator was coming at him with a weapon (knife or gun or bat or whatever) and wouldn't respond at all to instructions and was yelling "shoot me" then turned and came at him, he would empty at least half of his clip, due to training and experience. He said they train to put between 3 and 9 rounds on target in a matter of seconds and I have seen this guy at the range, and he is an excellent shot. He could easily put 6 or 8 rounds within a few seconds in a space the size of a dinner plate on a moving target at 20 feet or so. He said they train until it is ingrained, and little thought is required.
I do remember him telling me about his shooting he was involved in. After the fact he guessed he had shot 3 or 4 rounds, but in reality had come within 1 round of emptying his gun. In the heat of the moment I doubt that counting rounds is on their mind at all, and stopping the perpetrator is.
I guess personally the only experience I have with this is my martial arts training. As I have mentioned on the board before, in my mid-20's to mid-30's I was fairly heavily involved in krav maga. Some things get drilled into you so much in that type of training that it becomes second nature. When I was about 30 or so I was just wrestling around with some friends at a picnic/reunion of sorts one summer when I had been training pretty frequently thinking about entering an open form tournament (precursor to MMA I guess you would say) and one guy got behind me and tried to put on like a chokehold. I just reacted, got ahold of his wrist, spun under and away and came back up with an elbow to his face, breaking his nose. I didn't mean to do it, and didn't even think about it, it just happened so fast I couldn't really stop myself. I felt terrible about it. I figure for the cops it has to be very similar, that when the moment strikes the training and muscle memory take over and what happens happens.
It isn't in any way an excuse for poor judgement or letting a situation get away from them before it ends up being a fatal decision, but I can understand how once the thing starts they may have fired 2-4 rounds that may to us seem excessive.
edit: Had to add this edit...I didn't seek out my friend, I actually ran into him at Maverik on my way to work...he was getting donuts. No joke. We had a good laugh about that.
