That we now know there was no gun in the car makes no difference. He was resisting arrest, repeatedly disobeying the police’s orders, and reached into the car. The moment he reached in the police were right to shoot him.
Yes, charliehall, in the back. And if you did that you would deserve to be shot in the back too. Do you seriously think they have to wait until he retrieves a gun, turns around, and begins firing?!
He was already armed with a knife. And now he was reaching for something. That’s enough.
Now that we know there was no gun we can only speculate what his intention was. Perhaps he was planning to get in and drive away, because he knew there was a warrant out for him and he had no intention of going to prison. Letting him escape would have endangered the community, so that would justify the shooting too, even under the modified fleeing felon rule that we have now.
The underlying problem is that too many black people imagine that being arrested is optional, that they have the right to disobey police orders and do what they like. George Floyd did the same thing, so that the police had to restrain him, which in his health condition was a bad idea for him. Eric Garner too. In both cases the police did nothing wrong, and the victims caused their own deaths by resisting while in such poor health that any kind of stress could kill them. Floyd had just swallowed a huge quantity of drugs, probably to avoid being arrested with them on him, so it’s really a straight case of suicide. Garner committed suicide by fighting when his heart wasn’t up to that stress.