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n5wd wrote:

G.A. Heath wrote:I would assume that civilians make a much higher portion of the stats than 25%, after all unless someone is in the military they are civilians. I would be concerned if the stats showed a very high percentage of the people shot by HPD were not civilian. /nitpick

Read the article again. It says that of all the people shot by HPD in the last 5 years, fully one-quarter of them were not carrying weapons.

Does that make any difference in your thoughts about it?

I think the point was, since the lion's share of contacts by LEOs are civilian, the frequency of police shootings should naturally be a similar ratio. I don't think he was being dismissive about them being shot.

GigAg noted the grand jury's role and it occurs to me there may be any number of circumstance where a person found to be "unarmed" while investigating the shooting does not preclude reasonable justification for that shooting.

Not a fan of Houston but it is easy when the smoke clears, the crisis is over and the scene processed to say that a person was unarmed. During the crisis, under shoot/don't shoot scenarios not so easy. What are the LEOs supposed to do in the dark of night, wait and see if that shiny object in the hand of an erratic and confrontational subject really is a gun or knife?

gigag04 wrote:If they keep getting cleared by grand juries then so what?

Maybe they actually weighed the whole circumstance vs. the singular "he was not armed" fact.