Citing unspecified traffic violations is not the same as saying ‘we had no reason’. Cops stoping citizens without reason is always unconstitutional…..but cops not specifying to the public why they initiated a stop against a citizen in the midst of an ongoing investigation into a shooting death is not unconstitutional.
My point is that the cops who have been caught in a few whoppers already and wildly over-reacted at every point have yet to get their story straight enough to find a constitutionally justified reason to have stopped Walker. Sure, it may come out that they were justified, but we don't actually have any good reason to be confident that they were, right now.
Had the driver done what the law always requires and stopped for the blue lights, presumably he would now know specifically why he was being stopped.* He didn’t. He tried to flee when the lights came on. That is very compelling evidence that he believed he was doing something illegal at the time. How big a stretch is it to believe (as they have actually claimed) that the cops that attempted to stop him also reasonably believed they had a constitutionally valid reason for the stop?
Running from the cops does not mean one believes that they are doing something illegal. Sometimes black people feel that cops will pull them over and shoot them despite no illegal activity (probably based on the repeated instances of that exact thing happening) and run out of sheer fear rather than a guilty conscience.
Really, it is overwhelmingly more likely that both the cops and the driver knew that the attempted traffic stop itself was perfectly justified than that cops randomly attempted to pull a car over AND the driver of that car just bolted for no reason at all.
Cops often enough pull drivers for DWB that we don’t need to invent an example that, from every bit of actual evidence, appears not to be such a case.
Very much of the "actual" evidence is after the fact justifications given by the police that shot Walker, and just might be a bit tainted by 8 cops who wildly over-reacted and killed a man and are now trying to cover their ass. The fact that a lot of their claims aren't consistent with the evidence (first aid vs handcuffed and thrown in a squad car, saw him reach for his gun when he was unarmed and video doesn't show that, the reported white driver of his car the previous night now becoming consistent with Walker, etc) has me very skeptical about the rest of their claims as well, and
very skeptical that 3 weeks later they
still can't come up with a valid reason to have tried to pull him over in the first place.
*let me just poison the well against anyone claiming this is me justifying the cops having killed this guy. It clearly is not.
You've been pretty clear that you don't think this was a "righteous kill". I believe that you do not think the killing was justified, and in fact only 2 posters here seem to think that it was justified or appropriate.
eta: well silly me for not realizing you had a damn good reason for the *.
ponderingturtle, sarge is clearly not saying cops did everything right here. That's Warp12, and he's clearly doing it to get attention.
