The officer was indoctrinated to behave this way, to exhibit forceful authority, and is clearly heard to be battling his personal instinct that he fucked this o

The officer was indoctrinated to behave this way, to exhibit forceful authority, and is clearly heard to be battling his personal instinct that he fucked this one up, and doesn't have a single clue what to do because his conscience says one thing and his training says another and he is too young to have developed the detachment from self that older officers and soldiers do. I took his "you should've kept your hands up" as a tortured mind desperately trying to save itself from crushing guilt over having snuffed out the life of an innocent man. I'm not condoning or condemning the behavior of the officer. Nor am I trying to garner sympathy for him. The fact is a man was fatally shot, and he didn't have to be, and we do not know who ... really who ... is to blame. It's natural to rush to judgment and a sense of vigilante justice, to reconcile the debt owed to the community and to society at large. But this sort of thing is a symptom of something much bigger than a slogan or a talking point. Honestly, I'm struggling with figuring out what can we, as technologists, do to make this country less panicky and prejudiced, without being dismissed by the people we would seek to help. There is a lot that we don't and can't understand about the way the officer was thinking. Only that he was panicked and relatively young, and perhaps that shines a light on a part of the story we don't talk about enough: who SHOULD be policing the streets? What is done to ensure their psychological health and mental capacity to exhibit calm decisiveness in the face of so many potentially fatal unknowns? Incidentally, that town isn't an area where cops often use their firearms. White-on-black (or, it seems in this case, Asian-on-black) violence from law enforcement isn't endemic to that part of the country. Sorry I'm rambling. I'm really saddened by this story. Nothing about it should've gone down the way it did.