We want them to do it in a way that doesn’t involve folks who aren’t violent criminals getting shot to death though, right?
Yes. However in this case they had every reason to believe they had a violent suspect. The circumstance just has a very unfortunate overlap where a non-violent suspect with a warrant got confused with a violent one in the same area wearing the same colour top and roughly the same ethnicity. It’s harder to imagine a situation where the police wouldn’t reasonably think she was the suspect they were after, given her behaviour.
I’d be reluctant to call it a wrongful death, even. It was probably avoidable, however in the heat of the moment she was driving her car through a crowd of officers, so the officers have every right to shoot her to get her to stop.
It’s very easy to sit back in your chair with the luxury of hindsight and say how things could have been handled differently - they could have had more cars, they could have surrounded her better, whatever. That doesn’t mean that it’s reasonable to expect all of that to be done in a high pressure situation. I mean, can you really argue that they should have done all that without arguing that she shouldn’t have tried to drive away?
buran