F
@rhyno This happened in my city, so I am familiar with all of this.
Charlotte has a notoriously shitty police department, I could go on for days about just how sub-par they are at their job. This is a primary example of their poor police work. However, in this particular situation, I think it is all a bit 50-50.
They police violated several standard practices that, if followed correctly, would have likely left the situation with everyone still breathing. But there has to be some blame on the man shot here. He came into the BK with a gun, threatening people, and went into the kitchen area after someone he was having a dispute with. He then still had the gun in his possession and did not respond in a smart way to the officers when they arrived responding to multiple reports of someone threatening people with a gun. I don't know what his state of mind was at the time: watching this it seems obvious he was not right in the head, and I would think that an officer should have been able to draw the same conclusion and react in a different manner, but his erratic actions are ultimately what put himself in danger.
So to me, the shooting was almost certainly unnecessary, but there is no way the courts are going to rule it anything but justified. And this is coming from someone that, if you have read some of my other posts, thinks very little of the Gestapo we now have as police officers in most parts of this country. The policework here was certainly shoddy, but there is nothing anywhere as close to as bad as the Philando Castille incident. And they let that shitty cop off 100% free. So there is no way anything is happening to the cops on this one