Police story vs. eyewitness story: be careful of headlines

The headline of this story is,"Sheriff: Elderly Bastrop man shot after he refused to disarm".  It seems pretty cut and dried.  Hero cops got called out to deal with a threat.  They gave him every chance to drop his gun so they shot him.  Rightous shoot, it would seem.  Thank God for our police who work so hard to protect and to serve.

That's the way it seems to most people because most people don't do anything but scan the headlines.  In order to find the real truth you have to take 2 minutes and read the story.  Of course, that is 2 minutes too many and so the headlines stand.

When you start reading, of course, the Sherrif's office gets first say:
"...deputies responded to a 911 call from a female resident of 121 Stony Mont Drive in Del Valle for a domestic disturbance call. When they arrived on site just before 4:30 p.m., they were confronted by Jose Cantu, 78, who was in possession of a firearm.

The two responding deputies, 30-year-old Mark Garcia and 32-year-old Stephen Broderick, repeatedly asked Cantu to disarm, which Cantu “disregarded” before pointing his weapon at the deputies.
“Fearing for their safety,” the statement reads, “deputy sheriffs discharged their weapons, striking Mr. Cantu.”

OK, still sounds kosher. But then again, what else would the Sheriff's office say?  Now let's compare that to what non-government employee type witnesses say really happened:

• One witness said one of two deputies first on scene yelled a single command to "lower the weapon" before opening fire.
• The "dangerous perp" was 78 years old.
• The gentleman was shot in his wheel chair.
• The gentleman is a stroke victim who was paralyzed (that was his condition before the heroic police arrived).
• The heroic police shot "over a dozen bullets" into him. 
• The dangerous weapon that required a hail of police bullets was a BB gun that the old guy carried with him in his wheel chair "because of nuisance chickens disturbing his yard".

So, I'm supposed to believe that not one but two highly trained police geniuses can't tell a real gun from a BB gun.  Bullpucky!  And I'm supposed to believe that they could not have backed off to a safe distance behind their car upon seeing the gun and find a better way to control the situation?  Balderdash!!  They saw their opportunity to shoot someone, make up a story about being in danger and then collecting a bunch of PAID TIME OFF while the whole thing gets reviewed.  That could take weeks in which time the cops can have a nice vacation on the public's tab.

I gotta tell you.  I've about had it with trigger happy cops.  They take any opportunity to draw and shoot that they can get.  If you have a dog then whether he is dangerous or not they will often kill it "for everyone's safety".   Here, see for yourself:  google police shoot dog for no reason.

It's almost like they are trying to push people into retaliating against them so that they can declare martial law.  But why ever would they do such a thing?  I mean, people don't just do random acts.  There is always a reason for the actions even if you don't agree with it.  Perhaps the reason is right under our eyes.  Perhaps they fear the collapse of the global debt Ponzi and what that could do to their job security to say nothing of their pensions.  Perhaps if they were being attacked by people who were getting revenge for foul past actions of cops then there would be justification for increased police "protection" of the public.  

Don't laugh.  Many police departments have gotten decimated by the collapse of city budgets and in a growing number of cases the police pension fund is defaulted upon by the city.  This paper claims that, "Pension plans operated by state governments on behalf of their employees are underfunded by an estimated $452 billion".  Do you think that the police are oblivious to this reality?  Really??  Police are aggressive personalities by nature.  It's a job requirement.  Those kind of people don't take it lying down folks.

In the chart below compares the public's Google searchs for the term "police shootings" (blue) against their searchs for "city default" (orange) over the same time period.  There is at least some correlation there.  And it only makes sense.  Police are just people.  When they get attacked they are going to respond somehow.  Sometime it will be consciously and other times it will be subconsciously but to think that police will not behave like other people in aggregate is to believe in the tooth fairy.  RT did a story on it here.