Two Fort Collins police officers were cleared of any charges in a shooting which occurred last week. In the case, the suspect threatened the officers, saying that he had a gun. “[Officer] Spaulding then fired two rounds and [Officer] Ivers fired another shot as the suspect approached them, pretending to point a gun at them…. The suspect was hit once in the abdomen. The officers then determined that Evans did not have a weapon.”
The problem here isn’t so much that the officers shot an unarmed man. In the same situation, I might’ve pulled the trigger, too. The problem is that the default training for an officer is to use a gun. If the officers had had tazers or some other non-lethal weapon, they could’ve just as effectively neutralized the suspect without such grave circumstances.