I’m going to try to explain my position on this. Then I’m going to try to step away unless someone has a very specific question. I’ll try to answer it from my perspective as a guy that worked in the field since 1990, was a supervisor but was never in administration.
This will be justified. She was armed with a 3,000 pound weapon. She was moving forward and he was damn lucky he didn’t fall in front of her car. She was there to cause problems. She was in the act of causing problems. Bad stuff can happen when you mess with law enforcement. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. Like I said about another woman that got shot in the face awhile back, if she was doing what she as supposed to be doing that day she would be alive today. Proceed in an orderly fashion and this stuff doesn’t happen.
But this shouldn’t have happened. Law enforcement isn’t supposed to be a circus. It is sometimes, you can’t always prevent it. They know this is going to attract the nutballs and they seem to feel that is a feature not a flaw. I said it above, I will say it again, except under some rare and unusual circumstances it is usually a bad idea to shoot the driver of a moving car. The purpose of shooting people is to stop them from harming someone else. Shooting the driver of a moving car does not stop it. I have seen this exact scenario many times and it is a bonehead move, always found justified and is always regarded in behind the scenes law enforcement circles as exactly what *not to do.
As someone whose long la enforcement career is ending I have lived through a lot of nonsense thrust upon the good guys of law enforcement by the bad judgement of some real bonehead cops. For me it started with Rodney King in 1991. What happened in L.A. caused my job to get harder in Illinois. Every damn time one of these incidents happens, it makes life harder for officers everywhere. That’s the game. That’s what happens. This is the same. This reinforces the bs narrative about bad cops, thug cops, and justifies the culture of non-compliance becoming more entrenched.
Strive to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. Enough bad stuff will happen on its own, take some steps to tone things down, be a quiet professional. Get out there and make the bad guys pay. It will be harder to do today than it was yesterday morning.