They could have shouted instructions from a safe distance, hiding behind their car, and waited to see if he would comply.
Actually, good point. The video did have enough information to show that the cops initially made a very poor judgment call to drive up
in the park, rather than from the street. This detail that did not fully register yesterday with me does cast a large responsibility on the part of the officers for this tragedy.
I have no law-enforcement experience. But I
have played a game called SWAT 4 fairly extensively for a bit. That game is a rough simulation of being a SWAT officer called on to high-danger situations. It's very procedure-heavy, and killing a suspect without first yelling "STOP POLICE" will cause the player to lose points, as would other situations that would trigger that "Unauthorized use of deadly force" penalty.
Obviously this is no substitute for the real thing, as the stakes are not life-and-death, but get-the-highest-score. If you fail, just try the mission again. It's frustrating, because some of these missions are LONG (later ones up to 20 minutes or more), and you can be killed almost immediately even from full health. If you die, the entire mission fails. But it's still nowhere near the same. However, it has given me at least a small sense of how to handle a situation where someone has a gun, and the general rule of thumb is this: if you're going to an area where someone is very likely to be armed,
keep your distance. You don't open a door randomly without first checking to see if anyone's behind it, and if your surprised, you're probably going to pull the trigger on whoever surprised you, even if they turn out to be a civy (which fails the mission, too, by the way). Keeping your distance and playing carefully can allow you just enough time to make a judgment call with complete information.
Tamir was just walking away with his hands in his pockets, casually. There's no indication that he was interacting with the cops from a distance. Again, the ghosting and lack of sound makes it virtually impossible to determine exactly what happened between the cop getting out of the car and shooting (even the moment of shooting would require multiple watches to fully determine, and I don't think my hyper-empathy could handle that), but unless several seconds of footage was removed (and I see no reason why it would have been as the video was released directly by the police and such editing would severely discredit them), clearly whatever happened was a split-second panic on both the cop and Tamir. That's not enough time for either side to make a complete-information judgment call, and it could have been avoided if the driver had stayed in the street.
It's still not enough to make me consider this an example of police brutality as opposed to a tragic accident. But it does place large immediate responsibility on the part of the driver, at least, for putting the car in a position that didn't allow either his partner or Tamir to react with anything but panic.
