Officer Faces No Charges in Fatal Shooting in an Alabama Mall

[ThoughtEx.]

Officer Faces No Charges in Fatal Shooting in an Alabama Mall

An Alabama police officer will not be criminally charged for killing a young black man whom he had mistaken for the gunman in a shopping-mall shooting Thanksgiving night, the state attorney general’s office said Tuesday. The decision is likely to extend the debate over a tragedy at the intersection of gun rights and concerns over racial biases in policing.

The shooting death of Emantic F. Bradford Jr., 21, at the Riverchase Galleria mall in Hoover, Ala., prompted protests and raised questions about whether police officers are too quick to assume that a nonwhite person who is armed is a wrongdoer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/us/alabama-mall-shooting-death.html?smtyp=cur&smid=tw-nytnational

I strongly believe this to be a violation of that man's second amendment right. I do not think it's right that he was shot. I do not think the training police are getting is good, if it allows and calls for this to happen. And I don't think the justice system should shield officers who discharge their weapon as a knee jerk reaction.

 

[TheParser]

In 2019 America, prosecutors are very sensitive to charges of bias.

So we should assume that the prosecutor had good legal reasons not to bring charges against that police officer.

Apparently, the prosecutor felt that the police officer was acting within bounds.

If one was not actually at the scene, one cannot know what the police officer faced. (Let's not forget that just so far in this new year there have been seven police officers killed in the line of duty.)