Re: He is the 506th person to die in a police shooting this year in the Land of the FreeTM
Policing can be nasty and dangerous work. They tend not to interact much with the top 99% of orderly and civilized people, and the bottom 1% can be random, unpredictable and dangerous.
It can be indeed.
In this case you have someone declaring ahead of time that they have a Concealed Carry Firearm in the vehicle. You hopefully knew this already because you'd run the license plates through your data terminal before you even got out your cruiser.
The combination of knowing this person has a CCW license, and them freely declaring it to you tells you they are a fundamentally law-abiding individual, and moreover, if they had any intention of shooting you, they'd have likely already done it.
We have now had multiple cases where US LE Officers have requested a driver produce their license and have opened fire as they reached for it - in one case shooting an individual in the back as they reached into their car (Tony Martin got murder for that. Someone with their back to you is not a threat. They can become a threat very quickly, but if you're shooting someone in the back then you need an exceptional reason why).
This smacks of Scenario Fulfilment, which is a symptom of poor quality training. The officer has identified that they might be reaching for a firearm and in every such training simulation has ended up having to discharge their firearm, thus they get tunnel vision and start playing out their training even when reality diverges from training.
All that said, I do find it odd that in a country with such an apparent problem with firearm violence that most Police Uniforms do not include some level of body armour as standard. In the UK, the Met Vest provides protection from stabbing and limited ballistic protection even for non-Firearm Officers. Perhaps officers would be a little less trigger-happy if they were a little less exposed (either with a uniform met-vest or an under-shirt covert vest).
Biting the hand that feeds IT
