Patrick Lyoya | When do we start looking at the big-picture problems and taking a nuanced approach?

The video was released last week. I watched it. It was rough.

I’m not an expert in the law, policing, criminal justice or much else involved. But I have a vested interest in wanting police to be safe and accountable — for both their sakes and ours. So, I have some thoughts.

I’ve seen a lot of people say a lot of things over the past week. They basically boil down to “He wasn’t doing anything wrong and the cop basically executed him” or “He should’ve complied… he took his taser… the cop had a reasonable fear for his life and did nothing wrong.”

I don’t think either of these are very thorough analyses and there’s a lot more nuance to what happened. I would argue that mistakes were made by both parties, but that the bulk of the responsibility lies on the shoulders of the officer and that if he did do everything “by the books,” then the “books” need to be changed and some portion of his responsibility is on the department overall.

A big argument on one side of the fence is that Patrick took the officer’s taser so the officer had a reasonable fear for his life and therefore deadly force was justified. Without any other context, there might be a reasonable argument in there, but the problem is that it should…