When I see this headline, I think, "All well and good. SWAT-ing is essentially attempted murder. However, I find this part of the article biased: It should no

When I see this headline, I think, "All well and good. SWAT-ing is essentially attempted murder. However, I find this part of the article biased: It should not go unnoted here that Finch was unarmed and on his own doorstep when police killed him — with an assault rifle — reportedly because “he was reaching for his waistband.” Apparently the officer also “believed he saw a gun come up in Mr Finch’s hands.” Well, which was it, up or down? Was he reaching for the gun or raising it? Is it common for Wichita police to shoot someone within seconds of them answering the door, without assessing the situation — for instance, where the children are? As is sadly often the case in such shootings, the police are entirely without credibility here, and the officer involved seems to have faced no consequences. 1 - It's factually incorrect that Finch was shot by an "assault rifle." An AR-15 isn't an assault rifle. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Wichita_swatting ) 2 - Given what we know about the reliability of witnesses, especially in stressful situations, there isn't sufficient context in the article to come to such a conclusion. 3 - From the Wikipedia entry: Mrs. Finch reports that her 28-year old son "screamed and then they shot him". Moments after Finch stepped onto his front porch, police ordered him to put his hands up. According to officer testimony, he began to do so and then stopped. The officer may well have been reacting to the scream or to the way Finch was moving. That said, I have issues with police video simulation training, from what I've seen of it. I saw a video of a simulator session where the "right answer" was always to shoot. There were a sequence of scenarios, often looking innocuous, but then escalating very quickly to shooting. Again, there was no variation of whether the officer should shoot. It was only a matter of when. I've been watching the YouTube channel "Free Field Training" which is produced by an Illinois police officer. His take on using a gun in police work, is that a police officer might need to draw a weapon hundreds of times a year, but should expect to fire it approximately zero times, with an error bar of somewhere between 0 and 1. (Granted, the situation is different with SWAT.)