Touching on Everything and Anything

Monday, February 23, 2009

Cop fatally shoots man who wouldn't put hands up

I wrote a few days ago about how upsetting the situation in Philadelphia has been of late with all of the cop shootings taking place and in this story we almost had another cop shooting on our hands in the wonderful city of Philly. A man was assaulted late Friday night in Philly and he gave a description of his assailant to officers. When the cops saw someone matching the description and tried to question him he took off running. They repeatedly asked him to remove his hands from his pockets and when he finally did he had a gun in his hands. This is when the cops shot at the man and he died.
This situation is eerily similar to the situation where an officer was the one shot to death just last week. The only difference is that in this case the cop was quick and decisive enough to take action and kill the assailant. I have to say in this story I am 100% on the side of the police officers. The person that they were chasing was not an innocent person, if he was there would have been no reason for him to take off in the first place. The seccond this savage pulls out a gun on an officer all the rules go out the window and the officers have every right to shoot at him.
In this situation we got lucky that there was not another cop killed. The new regulations about cops and situations when the can and when they can not discharge their weapons have gone too far. The people that are benefited most by the rules and regulations are the criminals themselves because they are well aware that cops have very limited circumstances where they can do anything to them. This raises the probability of a criminal trying to run away and endanger others because there are limited actions that a cop can do in many situations.
One thing that really irritates me about this story is the title of the article; "Cop fatally shoots man who wouldn't put hands up". It makes the cop sound like a trigger happy person who could not wait to fire off some rounds. The message that they were chasing a criminal and that the criminal pulled a gun on them is not conveyed in the title of the article. To me this is very irresponsible reporting and it conveys an unfair first impression when reading the article.

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