People that choke and make the wrong split second decision? I get that it's his fault for reacting too quickly but it's completely understandable as to why the officer would react the way he did to a guy reaching for something.
You gotta understand the amount of stuff cops put up an a daily basis. You can't go through all that and not be paranoid and jumpy to a fault. With that said, the officer still should not have fired at the civilian.
This shooting occurred near the UM campus in St. Paul, which is basically the safest suburb on the planet. The officer's day to day would be very boring in a place like that.
Maybe if he had been jumpy and shot him initially, that would have been explainable by incompetence. But he kept a gun on the woman while her daughter was in the car, and instructed her not to move, while her boyfriend bled to death. He didn't apply a tourniquet or call an ambulance for the misunderstanding. There were more cops on the scene later on, and they also neglected to help him by applying pressure to the wounds. (Not sure if its in the video, I didn't watch it because of the graphic imagery) None of them thought to help.
This is murder.
The evidence in the video is damning enough.
That's not something you can determine beforehand. If you want high grade operators who can react faster under pressure you're gonna have to start paying them more than $52k a year on average.
I'm all for whatever reform it takes to stop stuff like this from happening.
Pretty much this, and along with that a friendly reminder that cops are still people, too. People who still act on a basic instinct of self-preservation. The cop who shot the unarmed civilian (as far as I can tell) probably legitimately believed the dude was pulling a gun and reacted in less than a second. It was a bad reaction nonetheless, but demonizing and antagonizing cops is the sort of mentality that leads to more stuff like this.
He pulled him over a broken taillight with his gun already out in the sunny, blindingly-white suburb of St. Paul and shot him after asking him to pull out his ID and license.. It's not as though Mr. Castile made a sudden movement against the officer's orders, he asked him to pull out an ID and he should have expected that kind of movement.
"Demonizing and antagonizing cops" isn't the end goal here. Major police reform is the goal.