It's never bright to jump in front of a moving car, especially one your engaged in a deadly force encounter with. However, before we all jump on a bandwagon here, a couple points:
Another example of police unreasonably demanding "compliance"
At the beginning of this video I disagree with this. The car is stolen, and the officer pulls it over, and tells the driver to get out at gunpoint. From the voices, at that point he is on the drivers side of the car. It is not unreasonable to demand the person operating a stolen vehicle to get out of it. Depending on what it took to get the car pulled over, or what the driver is doing, it's not unreasonable to do it, from the side of the vehicle, with a drawn weapon.
I would say that at 0:21 of the video in the first link, when the driver asked "What'd I do?", a LEO focused on deescalation would respond "This car is stolen", rather than just repeating "Get out of the car!" Hawkmoon has made the valid point elsewhere that LEO's are being trained to just repeat their demands louder and more command voice in the face of non-compliance, rather than try other techniques. I think this has proven to not be as effective as the trainers might wish.
Unbelievably reckless on the cop's part. There was a female passenger in the car. One of the shots shattered the passenger's window. The cop is lucky he didn't ventilate her along with the alleged perp.
This is untrue. In the same video at 0:48 you can clearly see the passenger start to roll the window down, and it's still intact at 0:49 when the second Police vehicle hits the passenger door of the stolen car and the impact breaks the window.
Even while on a moving hood it's pretty simple marksmanship to keep the shots on the driver's side of the car, and it appears the Officer, for all his other faults, did just that.
In general I think American police are getting too trigger happy these days, and this could very well be one of those cases, but a stolen car, passenger just out of jail (her admission is on the tape) and gun in the car make me think that this is a situation where one should wait for all the details to be investigated and disclosed before damning either side. It might save one from a serving of crow down the line.
On another note, the article said:
According to procedure, the department placed Starks on administrative leave on Feb. 22. Four days later, the department confirmed that Starks had been relieved of duty, and had surrendered his gun and badge.
Officers placed on administrative leave can continue to work in some capacities at the department. Officers who are relieved of duty cannot.
Does anyone have actual info on what that means. I would think if they fired him it would just say "fired" or "terminated". "Relieved of Duty" seems like it's a higher level of "You *expletive deleted*ed up" leave, but is short of being unemployed.
