Point of comparison: Just yesterday, St Louis PD went through a perhaps very similar situation with a shoplifter who became aggressive with cops and was killed (let's just assume that at least that much is a fairly direct comparison to what happened with Brown).
In the interest of "transparency", SLPD has already released a fair amount of information including their side of what happened, as well as cell phone video from a witness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=j-P54MZVxMU (if you have the heart for it).
Now, to be fair, this is also an entirely different situation for a number of rather obvious reasons:
- Powell (the "victim", for lack of better term, in SL) was armed with a knife and was undeniably behaving aggressively (or at the very least: aggressively enough to warrant a reaction from the cops).
- You might be able to reasonably call the SL incident a suicide-by-cop.
- We actually have fairly conclusive video evidence that, barring a major surprise, we don't have in the Ferguson case.
- While we still only have limited information available in Ferguson, but there really isn't much to dispute in SL. You could make arguments about how quickly guns were drawn, or use this as a talking point as to what options cops have to disarm a guy like this before shooting him numerous times, but at the end of the day I don't know that you can really dispute any reasoning the cops can give for killing Powell.
