A veteran Corpus Christi cop chose to forgo all less than lethal options and shot a mentally ill man who was barefoot and swinging around a pole.
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Typically law enforcement are trained that when there is one sole officer responding to a scene, where a suspect is armed with a dangerous/deadly weapon, that sole officer does NOT deploy their tazer or other less-than-lethal devices. They deploy their firearm, which is their handgun. Tazers are known to either mal-function – the “prongs” fail to penetrate the suspect due to bad aim by the officer, or to thick clothing of the suspect – or they are known to be ineffective on suspects under certain conditions, like mental illness or under influence of drugs. So, should that lone officer deploy a tazer, and it is ineffective, it could place that officer in a vulnerable position where the suspect could choose to charge them and attack them, when that officer is defending themselves with an ineffective weapon. Police generally DO NOT hold a tazer in one hand, and a handgun in the other.
What officers are typically trained to do – especially with persons with “close-quarter” weapons like knives, sharp blades, clubs or pipes like this suspect here – are to deploy their firearm to defend themselves, maintain a safe distance from the suspect, and CALL FOR BACK-UP!! Talk to the person while they wait, try to calm them down, de-escalate the tension of the situation. Once the back-up arrives, THEN one of them can deploy a tazer while the other keeps a firearm – the lethal-force handgun – at the ready, for a worst-case scenario.
This officer however showed very little of that training. The man with the pipe does not show to move toward the officer in the video – quite the opposite, the cop walks up to the man. He does NOT maintain a safe distance, and his advancement “provoked” the man into swinging the pipe. The man loses the pipe after one swing, and it falls away from him, and he slightly turns his back to the officer. The officer fires multiple rounds into the man, the last ones were fired into the man’s back. Most if not all of the shots take place AFTER THE MAN LOST THE PIPE FROM HIS GRASP, AND WAS NO LONGER A THREAT TO THE OFFICER REGARDING THE PIPE. With his back turned to the officer, the cop could have easily tackled the man from behind. In my opinion, it was a very blatant display of unnecessary lethal force applied, under the situation. Yes, the man could have seriously harmed the officer had he hit him with the pipe, but there was no scenario where the officer was placed into harm’s way. He (the officer) walked right into the harm’s way, when he should have simply waited for back-up to arrive.