Business As Usual. posted by Richard Seymour

New Orleans Police Shoot, Kill Man:

The city's embattled police department will have another internal investigation to face after a swarm of converging officers gunned down a man brandishing a knife.

A police spokesman said the officers who fired on the man Monday will be reassigned pending the outcome of the probe, but he defended their response, saying at least one officer's life was in danger just prior to the barrage of gunfire.

"You have a subject who's lunging at them with a knife... swinging wildly at them and they're fearing for their life," said Officer David Adams, a police spokesman. "They had no other choice but to resort to lethal force."

Officers repeatedly asked the man to drop the knife and used pepper spray to try to subdue him, but he used a cloth to cover his face and was still able to walk toward an officer and threaten him, authorities said.

"Evidently the pepper spray had no effect," Adams said.

How long before we are told that the guy had no knife, was issued no warnings and was actually affected in the normal fashion by the pepper spray before receiving at least half a dozen bullets?

Actually, never mind that for now. The guy was supposed to have had a knife with a three-inch blade. I just took out my tape measure - it's about the size of a pen-knife. And three or four police officers surrounding him couldn't disarm him? They had guns and pepper spray - yet their lives were in imminent danger? Already there is a suggestion in some reports that the guy "appeared mentally unbalanced".

I was going to say that this was reminiscent of the shooting of civilians in New Orleans during the post-Katrina crisis, the one where police claimed they fired at snipers who were shooting at relief contractors. And then there's Menezes and Rigoberto Alpizar. And then, frankly, it just occurs to me that there are so many comparable instances that I'm not going to bother. Just chalk it up as another body taken in the increasing aggression and militarisation of the state. Oh, and that Alpizar thing? The one where police shot an innocent man and then lied about him, claiming he threatened to blow shit up? Six days after it happened, the government gave the same federal air marshall dipshits greater powers to identify suspects.