So it got me thinking of how many ways we can look at this incident.
You could say that this is an unfortunate accident, that the officer in question felt his life was on the line, that the man who was shot was out of control, and that the police responded appropriately to the best of their ability. Perhaps if the officers had not responded, the erratic man might have hurt someone, (although he had not done so yet and was unarmed), because he certainly did not hesitate to beat the shit out of two cops. after all, we do have these laws in place for a reason, because there are crazies out there who hurt people, and nobody wants to get hurt, so the cops were just doing the job we'd all asked them to do.
All the people in the cars who called the cops did so because they didnt want to get hurt, but they didn't want to let someone else get hurt either, or because they were angry and annoyed, but wanted to pass the buck, get someone else to handle it. unfortunately, sometimes when you call the police, you do more harm than good. So we could look at this incident as emblematic of a society of nonparticipation, noninvolvment, that the people who refused to let the crazy man use the phone should be held responsible, the people passing in cars should have lent a hand; or we could flip it and claim these people were overinvolved, that the man should have been ignored, left alone, that we shouldn't be so afraid of people acting strangely, even of possible injury, as to allow the government to gain so much power over us that they can shoot us in the street and ask questions later.
It is a natural reaction to resist imprisonment. Maybe the man would have desisted if left alone. Perhaps the man would still be alive if there were a peacekeeping force that could be dispatched instead of men with guns and tasers (which are often abused and have killed on their own). After all, he was confused, unbalanced, and seeking help- he just wanted to use a telephone. Perhaps he was going through that special psychosis that happens as a result of medication withdrawal. Hey, maybe we can blame the meds on this one!
Nobody sane would expect a man behaving in that manner to not have the cops called on him, especially since he was wandering the halls of a school and walking out in traffic; and you'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb as rocks to not be aware that cops in chicago (or calumet) will shoot you if you try to beat them to death. So you could say he got what was coming to him, that he was acting like an idiot, that he was a crazy asshole to beat a guy half to death when all he had to do was go with them, spend maybe a day in jail, and work it out in the court room.
If it is found in a court of law that the cops acted improperly, they will be punished to at least a small degree, so it is not as though there is no safeguard at all against police abuses.
however, there have been cases where police officers got away with illegal/immoral behavior (and not just "in the past" either, shit happens all the time), so we could look at this as a situation of abuse of power.
You could even go long with it and say that this is yet another example of how much power we give up when we let the cops get away with whatever the hell they wanna get away with, when citizens have no right to stop them or question their actions, because they have the guns.
You could blame the guns. You could say that cops shouldn't have guns: or that nobody should, as it certainly doesn't seem much better for all the local loonies and crooks to have them too, but it also gives that second amendment a bit of shine; what happens when the cops get even more out of line? So you could even go further and say give everybody guns, or advocate for revolution.
Or maybe it's just another fucked up thing that happened in a fucked up world.
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