I'm surprised to hear people stating so confidently that this is murder, etc. Seems entirely baseless and silly to me.
I made a .gif of the relevant portion of the video, with slowed down timing:
[qimg]http://i.imgur.com/tGB6FIo.gif[/qimg]
It's still a bit difficult to see everything, but from my first viewing of the video it was perfectly clear to me that the officer was entangled with the vehicle in some way as it began to speed off. This is not even debatable. He gets dragged and knocked over by the vehicle driving off. He was put in danger by the vehicle's movement, and could've found himself getting driven over by it if the suspect had taken the right sort of jerky turn, and the cop had gotten pulled under the left tires.
Now, the one thing I will absolutely concede is that it seems like he was only really stuck to the vehicle because he himself was grabbing hold of something inside the car. To me it looked like he had ahold of the seatbelt, but perhaps it was the steering wheel or perhaps he went from the one to the other.
Even if he was only being dragged because he was holding on, ultimately the responsibility for things turning so crazy is on the criminal in the driver's seat. He endangered an officer's life by setting that vehicle in motion while the officer was not only right next to it, but holding on.
Everything happens VERY fast, and I don't see how you get "murder" out of an officer's split second, instinctive reaction to the suspect putting him in serious physical danger through his actions.
I think shooting the suspect was pretty much a reflex, and very impulsive. That sounds like it automatically makes it a bad move, but I'm not so sure it does.
I'd say this is the sort of thing that happens when you do the sort of stupidity he did. I'm sick and tired of us celebrating and making excuses for criminals.
As for the racial dynamic? Blacks are outrageously criminal as a group, so they have a reputation for criminality, and they have a lot of negative encounters with the cops. That's the natural, correct result of stupendous levels of criminality within a group.
Some people wish everyone could be judged purely as an individual, and never as a representative of a group. That's not reality, it's not realistic, and its not how the world works. The police will always have a different posture toward a 25 year old white man than they do toward a 75 year old white woman, too. This is entirely appropriate and normal. Even if we all agreed it was wrong, it still isn't something we can avoid. It's human nature.
If blacks want to stop getting shot by police so often, I'd recommend a dramatic drop in black criminality. There are almost no example videos of black suspects getting shot where they had no option to come out of the situation just fine, if they'd merely complied with the officer and with the law. That's the secret of "white privilege" btw.
In this case, there is absolutely no doubt based on the video that this suspect could have come through this stop just fine if he hadn't been such a law-breaking idiot.
I find the idea that this police officer's life should be ruined on the account of him possibly making a less than perfect decision in the heat of a dangerous moment as he was dragged by a car, being charged with murder, losing his job, his family thrown into turmoil - all for the sake of some 2 bit criminal - to be horrifying. What percentage of the people calling for this outcome have ever been put in a situation like that or would ever take a job where such an event was possible? Where any person you pull over could end up just shooting you in the face before you even realize they are a threat?
Let's be real. The only way we are going to get the sort of people we need in the sort of quantity we need them, for the job of police officer, is to include people who may not strike all of you as the PERFECT specimen. There's going to be a lot of overlap between people willing to take a job like that, and people who may to YOUR mind seem a little trigger happy or aggressive.
As long as officers still provide everyone they interact with a way to come through the interaction just fine (physically I mean) - that being the route of compliance and acting like a sane adult - then I don't see the issue.
This officer is being charged, indeed, because of #BlackLivesMatter and fear of the black "community" manifesting its outrageous criminality in a more focused, concentrated way than its normal steady drip, in the form of riots. That isn't a good thing. We're heading toward a society where policing this group is even more impossible than it is now.
