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>Yes it was bad, yes it was a mistake, and yes I am sure people will be held accountable. Do you know of any other countries where this type of incidents might occur. It's a rhetorical question.

Jos;

Well, I can speak for the San Francisco Bay Area, and such events occur here. We have had several within the past year.

Going back a few years (to me) here is the worst one I saw on live television.

The year was 1968. The SWAT team was activated in down town Los Angeles when someone called the police to announce a man with a gun was seen walking down the street. The police went to the area of a downtown hotel (flop house) where poor people lived.

An old black man stepped out of the threshold of the hotels entrance and was holding a brown paper bag. As he put the bag to his lips about one dozen officers opened up with AR-15’s in automatic mode. I forgot how many times he was shot. It was later determined that the bag had an alcoholic beverage in it. They never found the man with the gun. The person seen with the gun was white.

In 1970 traffic to Los Angeles from San Fernando Valley was halted. It seems that two policemen from Menlo Park (near San Francisco), were looking for an illegal alien and had an arrest warrant. They were leading a group of LAPD officers through a downtown residential area at 1030 PM.

One of the officers while looking up into the first floor window of a hotel room yelled, “There he is”! All the police cars stopped and the officers entered the hotel. They walked up the stairs and were lead by one of the Menlo Park officers. The lead officer broke down the door of the room and tripped, falling to the floor and discharged his weapon. The other officers opened fire on the group of illegal aliens sleeping in the room and killed many of them as they thought the men in the room had shot their fellow officer. None of the men in the room had a warrant for their arrest.

I could go on about many local incidents, which are recent. San Jose police have begun using Tasar Guns, to stun a person rather then shoot them with a gun. This occurred after several people were shot and killed under questionable circumstances. The use of Tasar Guns is under review as their use has resulted in several deaths recently.

In each of the cases I am aware of (at least one dozen) in each case the officer who killed someone was taken off duty for several weeks, received full pay, and exonerated. If an officer acts with “probable cause” then they are acting within the law. “Probable cause” is a most interesting term.

I think the problem with all of this is that a policeman has a fraction of a second to act or react to any given situation. That is a difficult position to put any human being in.

Tom