In THIS situation, the officer's conduct did not exceed the circumstances that he was dealt, he was in a deadly situation and needed to end the threat and he did so without harming anyone else.
Here's my point though, that can be supplemented with a "this time he wasn't negligent."
Had a stray round found an innocent bystander, we wouldn't be talking about how well he was trained or how the situation ended. Now, because it didn't, he's a hero. This time. And it sets a real bad precedent going forward as any Barney Fife can see that and say "hell yeah, I could do that!" You and I both know it. There are idiots amongst the ranks that would try some stupid crap like that.
Did the shoot meet the objective reasonableness standard? Yes...probably...but...conditions weren't as optimum as they could have been given the situation. And yes, I know conditions aren't optimum most of the time, but this one certainly was right on the thin edge of wrong. My objective standard?
He was firing on a moving vehicle from a moving vehicle. Through glass. And under stress which has shown to make accuracy suffer. Worse still was the fact his windshield is now getting much harder to see out of. Even with a big honkin target like an SUV, the potential for errant rounds to not hit the target is extremely high. Furthermore, at one point, he took both hands off the wheel to get a steady firing platform.
Umm, what?
Racing down a road trying to get an accurate sight picture to fire from a moving vehicle on a moving vehicle through a vision impaired windshield and you remove your hands from the wheel of the car? I don't care how smooth the roadway is, that's a huge, and avoidable, risk he shouldn't have taken.
Furthermore, he was at one point alongside the perp's vehicle. Pitt that mother****er. They don't put those ramming guards on your vehicles for aesthetics only. He was in a prime position to pull off the perfect Pitt and furthermore, with the completion of said Pitt, would have had his engine block between him and the perps. Get out and light those mother****ers up at that point.
No, there's a whole lotta lessons learned from this one. Mainly "don't ****ing do this, sport, it can end on a real bad note." I don't care how much training one has had on firing through a windshield, the sum of the individual parts in this one made me cringe.
Look, this is a former cop saying this and attempting to be objective and even giving some benefit of the doubt. I'm not some cop hater that questions everything that happens, but damn, guy, this one shouldn't be held up as a textbook anything nor defended by anyone in the blue.
He got real lucky in my opinion.
