Stop Shooting Criminals! (UPDATED)

At least that's the message we're getting here:

• An organizer of a downtown protest against police brutality Saturday said Flint Farmer’s death in June was “just another case of a young black man shot to death by police for no reason.”

  Farmer, 29, was fatally shot by police June 7 in the 6200 block of South Wolcott. Police have defended the shooting, saying he “aggressively came at” an officer responding to a domestic battery call.

  But protest organizer Grant Neuberger, reading from a letter from Farmer’s father, said the younger Farmer carried a cell phone, not a weapon, when he was shot.

Hey Grant? Too fucking bad. Daddy Farmer wasn't there and neither were you. And even if Flint was unarmed, he advances on an armed man and somehow wrestles the gun away? Now we have a big fucking problem. In our book (and fortunately in the laws on the books), the officer is given plenty of leeway to eliminate the threat and protect him/herself from great bodily harm and harm to others.

When it comes down to it, and the choice is between a cop going home in one piece and an ignorant piece of garbage with no impulse control advancing in an attempt to take a cop's gun, we're going to support the cop every time.

UPDATE: We've seen the video referenced in some of the comments. A few points for the armchair quarterbacks and civilian trolls popping up:

• Have you ever seen muzzle flashes at night? It lights up pretty much the entire area around - trees, grass, sidewalks, buildings. We don't see that in the video, so the conclusion drawn from the video is suspect at best;
• Police are completely within their rights, and we could argue, expected by law to shoot unarmed people in close quarters, because the minute they get hold of our gun, they're not unarmed anymore. In fact, a sizable percentage of officers murdered are killed with their own weapon. So the safest course of action for anyone in a high-stress close encounter is TO DO EXACTLY WHAT THE POLICE TELL YOU TO DO! No ifs ands or buts. If you want to go home in one piece, shut the fuck up and listen to the police and comply. You want to motherfuck the police, flap your gums and get a payday, then you do that at Civil Court, not on the street. And believe us, there are plenty of scumbag bottom-feeding lawyers more than willing to take your case on a contingency basis.
• And who the hell leaked the video to the media? Someone ought to see who benefits directly and indirectly from this piece of evidence being in the public realm. This is an ongoing investigation and guess who else in involved? J-Fled's very own feeb buddies. McCarthy ought to shut his mouth and start looking inward at what this mess means to the integrity of countless criminal investigations instead of saying there's a "problem." No shit Sherlock - there's enough problems here to fill a book. You aren't helping.
  

And to a couple of the unpublished trolls, you weren't there at all, but you're eating up the media reports littered with quotes from people WHO WEREN'T THERE EITHER and by people with an axe to grind. If we were there, we wouldn't admit it here, but obviously, we have more access to people who were present. But in your tiny agenda-driven minds, the police are always in the wrong regardless. So go fuck yourselves and go troll somewhere else. Your crap isn't seeing the light of day here. Go post some more drivel at the Tribune site - they seem to love that sort of thing.