And yet no other actions were taken, they just shot the kid right off the bat.
Cops should use lethal force as a last resort, not a first one. They should have tried to reason with the kid, or at least use non-lethal force. I say save lethal force until lethal actions are being committed by the suspect. If the kid actually started shooting, then that option is on the table, but not before. Lethal action should never be preemptive. It assumes guilt, and were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but clearly those cops passed judgement on this kid the moment they saw him. They didn't try to disarm the kid, they didn't try to talk to him and figure out the situation, didn't ask "hey is that a real gun" or whatever. They just saw him, told him to put his hands up, and then shot him when he didn't. Thats pathetic police work that basically disregards the fact that they are supposed to be peace keepers and public arbiters instead of thuggish militia, and its no wonder people hate them. Their job is supposed to be much more then to just walk around with guns and shoot potential threats or slap people with speeding tickets, but a lot of cops do the latter. Thats wrong. This course of action was wrong.
And to everyone who keeps posting articles about school shootings and shit, give it a break. Because 1 in a million kids do bad shit doesn't mean you should be paranoid that theres some psychopathic child with a gun around every corner that needs to be dealt with via bullets to the face, so that every case where theres even potentiality for it to reoccure needs to be carpet bombed. Though I get the sentiment, since our media so horribly takes advantage of those events to drill into the public consciousness a powerful sense of fear and anxiety. We're all to blame for this being a more common occurrence these days. We've all become scared little bitches shooting at shadows and creaking floor boards.
Bullshit.
As far as the officer knew, lethal action was about to take place as soon as the kid reached towards his waist for the gun. Lethal force was justified in the situation based on the information he had at his disposal, no matter how messed up it looks in retroactive hindsight.
The officers were responding to a 911 call about a possible juvenile waving around a possibly fake, possibly real firearm which may or may not have been loaded.
You want officers to wait until they're fired on before they respond with lethal force? Hell. No. Not just because it places the officer at risk, but also because it places any innocent bystanders at risk as well.
As a first responder, the officer had only a one key piece of information:
1) Someone was waving a god-damned gun around, scaring the shit out of people in the vicinity. Maybe the gun was fake, but it looked real enough and the person in question holding it was threatening enough that the caller dialed 911 rather than confronting the kid himself.
This cop you're judging as so bad at his job arrived to find someone who "might" have been a juvenile according to the 911 call, who put the weapon in his pants when the officers arrived and reached for it rather than putting his hands up when ordered to do so by an officer giving a legal order with a firearm drawn.
At that point, the officer had a choice: Risk that this young male, who could be anywhere between twelve and sixteen, who may or may not have a real weapon, is willing to talk things out after he gets his weapon pointed at him or any innocent bystanders or that maybe he's in over his head, or do I ensure public safety to the best of my ability?
The officer walked into the situation with a hell of a lot of unknowns. Unknown age, unknown weapon, unknown intentions on the part of the kid who got shot... He knew nothing going in except someone was pointing a firearm at people in a threatening manner.
From there, it was the cold calculus of battlefield triage, something they teach in First Aid courses and which I'm
sure is taught to police officers and other first responders: Your life is more important than a bystander's life. The unfortunate addendum to that, of course, is that a bystander's life is more important that a combatant's life, which the kid qualified for by having a potential weapon and reaching for it rather than surrendering.
That's why the situation is so crappy for everyone involved: Nobody thinks that kid deserved to die, no matter how stupid he was acting. He was a kid trying to act tough with a toy gun. That guy who called 911, the dispatcher who followed doctrine and didn't inform the officers that the guy who called 911 thought it was fake, the officer who wound up killing that kid, the officer who watched a rookie gutshot a child, the kid's friends and family, any bystanders... All of them are going to live with that moment for the rest of their lives.
Yes, it's shitty that the kid got shot. He didn't deserve that.
But he was doing something incredibly stupid, and it escalated in a way I'm sure he never foresaw happening, but was basically an inevitable response to his behavior before the 911 call. This didn't happen in a vacuum. The cops were called because this kid was shoving a realistic gun in people's faces in a threatening manner.
As far as the cops were concerned, he could have been one step away from pulling the trigger of a real gun, which is why they acted the way they did.
The only failure here is on the parents and/or guardians who failed to teach this kid how to behave in public, especially with something that looked exactly like a firearm, and whoever was stupid enough to give a twelve-year-old child carte blanche to run around with it in the first place.