Charlotte police wrongfully killed a man on Saturday.
In the early morning of Saturday, Sept. 14, a woman heard a knock on her door at about 2 a.m. She said she thought it was her husband whom she had been waiting for, but when she realized it wasn’t, she quickly shut the door and called the police. She said that a man was trying to break into her house.
The person at the door was Jonathan Ferrell, 24, who was in a car accident shortly before and walked to the closest house for help.
When the police arrived, Ferrell started toward them for help, “prompting” one officer to shoot him with a stun gun, which proved unsuccessful in stopping him. According to CNN, the police told the man to stop, but the man kept running. One officer then shot Ferrell multiple times, killing him at the scene.
Ferrell was unarmed. The officer who killed him did not shoot him in the leg or in the foot, but in the chest multiple times. The cop made a huge mistake, and an innocent life was lost because of it.
A man with a family and a future lost his life because of miscommunication and poor decision-making. That is completely sickening — and unfortunately this is not the first occurrence of such an incidence.
In August, a man was shot 15 times in his driveway because he was mistaken for a car thief. Just this month, two women were wounded in New York City because of a misfire. A few years ago in Seattle a teenage boy was shot in the leg several times by police because they mistook his cell phone for a gun.
Must I continue?
Granted I do understand that minds think differently when they are put in stressful situations, and I know that fight or flight is a real thing, but when that oath is taken and that uniform has your name on it I believe your mindset has to change. You have to be able to make those hard decisions seamlessly without a single drop of sweat.
I do think, though, that sometimes an officer’s pride gets in the way of his or her decision-making. Too many times I’ve seen officers on a “high horse” and see them feel as though they are above the law. Mostly everybody has flipped on the news to hear the same story of a kid getting beaten by the police for committing a small offense or for doing nothing at all.
I think they should stop waving their guns around just because they have a badge. They should put them back in their holsters and think before they pull the trigger because behind that uniform is a person, just like the person being aimed at. I guess they just get trigger-happy. But hey, who knows — maybe when a police uniform is put on it really does make the human in it an all around better person and of higher status than those who do not sport that classic tight, black outfit.