I disagree, if you're a cop you have an obligation to be more upstanding than the average man not less. You use that gun with discretion and you can't go around popping off rounds just because you have a slight suspicion of what they're doing, and Walter Scott, though he was a criminal did not deserve death.

That being I said I also understand being a police officer is a hard job, and if you live in tough neighborhoods with high crime rates you're going to see a lot of shit normal people don't see. It takes its toll and you're going to have to find a way to cope with it, as well as getting a picture inside your head about what a criminal looks like: young, black, and male. Because let's face it, saying that a somewhere a black thug will commit a crime is like saying the sun will come up tomorrow. And no amount of political correctness will change that.

We need a better way to handle petty criminals and thugs. No matter how scummy they may be, shooting them isn't the answer and it only makes cops look bad. If middle class, professional, black people were getting gunned down for no reason then this would even more of a serious problem, but the people in these shootings are hood rats. It's hard to feel sympathetic for someone like Mike Brown when he strong armed a gas station half an hour before his death. Or Walter Scott when he owed thousands in child support. Freddie Gray had a rap sheet a mile long.

There's a lot of gray in this area. I personally believe the officer in this case was in the wrong and should do time. But we also need to understand why this happens. It doesn't just boil down to 'systematic racism' that's an invalid, stupid argument. You can't pin that on every white cop or every cop in general. The relationship between the police and citizens simply needs to improve.