An officer in Tucson, Arizona recently decided to shoot an aging man in a wheelchair nine times as he left a Walmart. 

61-year-old Richard Lee Richards was accused of supposedly stealing an item from a local Walmart, so an employee called the cops. That's when Officers Ryan Remington and Stephanie Taylor arrived on the scene. What happened next was gruesome — without ever warning he would shoot, Officer Remington opened fire into Richards' back.

By the time the bloodbath was over, Remington had discharged nine bullets into Richards' body, mostly into his back, until his bullet-ridden body slumped out of his wheelchair. All were at close range.This atrocity was so egregious, the Tucson Police Department actually decided to immediately fire the officer of its own volition. Since departments usually fight tooth and nail to avoid firing a Killer Cop, this just shows how horrifically trigger-happy Officer Remington was. But simply being off the force is not enough. This man is a danger to society — and he's now a recorded killer.

Tell Arizona authorities to bring charges against former Officer Ryan Remington, a Killer Cop, and also urge the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate this deadly police shooting!

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• Over the last five years, The Times found, the police killed more than 400 drivers or passengers who were not wielding a gun or a knife or under pursuit for a violent crime.
• Traffic stops — which are often motivated by hidden budgetary considerations because of the ticket revenue they generate — are the most common interactions between police officers and the public. Yet the police consider them among the most dangerous things they do.
• That presumption of peril has been significantly overstated, but it has become ingrained in police culture and court precedents — contributing to impunity for most officers who use lethal force at vehicle stops.

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If they did nothing wrong, why the need for discipline and retraining?

 sirdroseph wrote:

yea he probably should have waited on that

 davidharper wrote: 
On FB I just saw the predictable post by Common who does good work in the community, but am terribly disappointed that he is contributing to the problem.  Like clockwork, the picture of the "girl" in pigtails taken 5-10 years ago was posted with the usual rhetoric of this has to stop, this poor little girl, blah, blah, blah.  They can disband the police if they want, but at some point the black community is going to have to face their issues.....or not.  White people in general are absolutely powerless at this juncture in history other than to prostate themselves for self glory at the cult of victimhood exacerbating the situation, it is ultimately up to the black community.

If the girl in Ohio was attacking me with that knife I would want the cop to shoot her.  

 westslope wrote:
Sure, but you have to be prepared for the tactic to fail spectacularly.

In a defensive situation—where you're shooting someone who is trying to kill you or others—The goal is not to kill or wound but to stop. You usually have milliseconds to make the call. You shoot for the biggest, easiest target: the center of mass. If you try and aim for a smaller target it will take longer and fail more often. Your shots will head off into the background rather than the target and you're more likely to fail at the goal of stopping the fight.

If you think that's easy enough to do under life-and-death pressure I invite you to try it. Not for real, but against the clock. You're up in Canadia so that will require jumping thru an awful lot of hoops and may not be possible at all; it's straightforward enough here in the states.

There are popular forms of competitive shooting that attempt to duplicate the pressure, confusion, and pace of an actual gun fight. Obviously the stakes are a lot lower, but you'd be surprised how effective it can be at disrupting the shooter's composure and forcing errors.

And that's in a situation where you know what's about to happen and where you know a mistake isn't going to kill anyone. It can be pretty eye-opening.

Once you have that perspective think about a real-world situation, where your first mistake could be your last, or an innocent bystander's last, or your partner's, or a crime victim's. Where you never know if the guy you just pulled over is desperate/high/angry enough to kill people to avoid being arrested. Where most civilians will be offended by your not knowing that, and taking steps to protect yourself. Armchair SWAT officers can second-guess at their leisure and pontificate that you should just train more, but the decisions that get made usually happen with a huge amount of ambiguity, in poor light, in a big hurry, with lots of distractions. And those decisions get made by humans.

So the doctrine is kept as simple as possible: aim for the center of mass, shoot until the threat is gone. And I'm fine with that. And understanding that—and the inevitable connection between that threat of violence and the notion that there ought to be a law—makes me want to put people in that situation as seldom as possible, and only for very good reasons.

 westslope wrote: 
That is a very old question much older than the existence of such things like tasers.  The answer is the same now as it was then, No.

It is why we now have things like tasers.  An alternative to guns.  Sometimes even guns are not enough to stop someone in time.

Simply put, the use of a gun is the use of a deadly force.  To be used only in certain circumstances, such as here in Columbus, Ohio the other day, when it was used to save the victim from immediate and real harm.  Hesitate and two people might be dead instead of one.

OK.  Just had a really dumb question pop into my head.  Here it is:

Is it not possible to train police officers to shoot to immobilize without killing the suspect?

 sirdroseph wrote:

More police die by suicide than by other causes?   I did not know that.

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