Assisted suicide?

[Jackalope]

Thankfully, it is not impossible for officers to lose their jobs and go to criminal trial over this sort of thing, when warranted.

[...]

One unfortunate part is that sometimes an innocent officer gets tarred with the same brush, just from public outrage. Some are forced to retire, even after being cleared of all charges.

Yeah, and those cases are unfortunate. On the other hand, we also have cases where a bad shoot is covered up and the cop returns to the street.

There is the issue of public perception - the process of internal police investigation is probably not as transparent as it ought to be, and there's a lot of feelings that it's rigged in favor of law enforcement. I'm not arguing that this is so - but that it is perceived to be so, and that in and of itself is an issue.

Actually, I'm not seeing anything in your posts anymore that I really have any opposition to. We're really coming to the same place from two different directions. You say, "not because I think he's guilty, but to bring a greater sense of legitimacy to the investigation." I'd want to avoid premature judgments from the public, so that the investigation has a chance to mean something, instead being lost in confirmation bias.

Yeah, we agree, I think. It'd be great if public prejudice could be avoided - it's a hot-button issue and some of that is unavoidable. One contributing factor to public outcry is that investigations of police shootings are typically handled by police and there's understandable suspicion that the process isn't objective (and transparent, as I noted above).

As far as there being cases where officers were adjudicated to have acted wrongly, yes, there certainly are cases where that is the case. However, there also exist jurisdictions where this rarely if ever happens, and there is a public perception of whitewashing.

I do understand that deadly force is unfortunately (for all involved) occasionally necessary. It's also unfortunate that we have cases like this where a judgment call went horribly wrong and an innocent person was injured or killed, due to being unable to respond as a result of a disability.