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

After THAT amount of ordnance sounds like they never found the brown bagger either!

>
>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.

In the UK it's "reasonable grounds to suspect..."
>
>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

I guess it all boils down to - Give a man a gun and, when it gets down to the crunch, he can't help popping a few caps. The illegal alien room example - the other cops could have retreated from the doorway to take stock, think a second (are there any more shots? Is our colleague getting up) but, guns drawn, hear a shot, fire back.