Confederate Yankee reports on the inquest:
So it would appear that the prosecutors and the police are indeed on the same page in this case. Whatever animosity they might bear toward each other is being put aside and a common front presented. What is the significance of the apparent approach of the police and prosecutors to date? Even if one accepts their theory that Scott was a drug addict and an aggressive gun nut intent on carrying a gun wherever he wanted, who, through gross drug-induced impairment, brought about his own death, all of this should rightfully be nothing more than mitigating evidence that might have some bearing on the severity of a charge to be brought against the officers, or to be considered only after a potential future conviction as mitigating factors relating to sentencing.
What still remains is what the officers knew or reasonably could have known or inferred at the time they confronted Scott at the main entrance of Costco and made the decision to pull the trigger. It is this event, compressed in time, that should be the prosecutor’s foremost concern. Scott’s life history and his physical and mental health status could have, in at least some way, put him on a collision course with the police that day. But the ultimate question is whether they, knowing nothing about Scott but what they heard on the radio on the way to Costco, and apparently finding themselves surprised when a Costco employee suddenly pointed out a man they had never before seen, were justified under the law by his actions in the handful of seconds before they fired at least seven rounds into him. Under this, the only standard that truly matters, the evidence presented at the Inquest does not yet tend to favor or conclusively exonerate the police.
There is no question that the police are lying. The fact that the man was shot five times in the back, and that an ambulance driver saw them take Scott’s holstered weapon out of his waistband and put it on the ground, is enough to condemn them of not only an unlawful and lethal shooting, but obstruction of justice as well.
One police officer commented: “Seems as if many here are not willing to give Law Enforcement the benefit of the doubt until the inquest is over. This saddens me as a Police Officer and retired Marine.”
No, we’re not. Because Law Enforcement doesn’t merit it anymore. Not all cops are murderers, thieves, and pedophiles, but most cops are willing to look the other way whenever their “brother” cops commit crimes. And that is why they fully merit the contempt in which they are now held by so many Americans. A badge is not a license to commit more crime than the average civilian, it is an indication that the police are to be held to a higher standard of behavior, not a lower one.