The San Francisco Examiner provides the backstory from Police Chief Greg Suhr:

About 45 minutes before the police shooting, a victim who had been stabbed in the shoulder walked into San Francisco General Hospital and described his assailant. The victim is expected to survive.

The officers were just wrapping up their search for the suspect when other officers found him on the 2900 block of Keith, between Gilman and LeConte avenues, Suhr said. The man was reportedly armed with the kitchen knife police believe was used in the stabbing.

The officers convened and told the man to drop his weapon, Suhr said. Witnesses on a nearby bus reportedly confirmed the exchange to police.

The police were confronted with a man with a kitchen knife who had already demonstrated that he was willing to use it.  While he was certainly close enough to the police that he could attack them, they were similarly close enough to him to put themselves in the putative zone of danger.  They ordered him to drop his weapon. He did not.

Instead, it appears that he tried to walk away.

How many shots were fired?  A lot. Counting them doesn’t seem to add much to what happened, and what happened is that the police killed the man, whose identity remains unknown.*

In the aftermath of this killing, Suhr explains the justification.

“The suspect had already demonstrated, by committing a felony aggravated assault, that he was a danger to others, so he could not be allowed to move away from the scene,” said Suhr.

Asked about the video and whether or not it demonstrates police brutality, the police chief reiterated that the suspect “does have the knife in his hand and he does move toward officers.”

Suhr also stressed that the video above, as well as several other videos and eyewitness accounts, corroborate the officers’ account of the incident.

The scenario described, aside from the fact that when one officer opens fire, the herd mentality compels the others present to shoot. And shoot. Because it would be a shame if there was a good shoot available and they failed to get their shots in, could well serve as a litmus test.

Could the police “not allow him to move from the scene”?  Well, certainly they couldn’t allow him to walk away, go home, pretend as if nothing happened. If he stabbed someone 45 minutes earlier, then there was certainly damn good cause for arrest. But that doesn’t really address the situation posed.

While Suhr says he was “mov[ing] toward officers,” the video shows clearly the opposite. He was moving away, but an officer chose to put himself in a position to prevent his doing so.  That the officer sought to prevent him from leaving hardly seems inappropriate; that’s what should be done when confronting a violent felon.  At the same time, let’s be honest about it, and not spin the facts.  It wasn’t wrong of the officer to prevent the man from leaving, but the man wasn’t moving toward the officers either.

All of this raises the question of what to do.  A man with a knife. A man with a knife who has already demonstrated a willingness to use the knife to harm another.  A man with a knife who won’t drop it, despite being surrounded by a bunch of cops with guns pointed at him.  This is a situation ripe for a bad ending.

Perhaps the man was on drugs. Perhaps he was mentally ill. There are many questions about why this man failed to take the only rational path available to him.  But there are irrational people out there. Being irrational isn’t a capital offense. At least, it shouldn’t be.

In contrast, at the moment when the officer opened fire, and the lemmings pulled their triggers as well, because that’s what lemmings do:

However, San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi told the Chronicle that “the person [in the video] was not posing a direct threat and certainly did not have to be shot.”

While there was nothing smart or justifiable about the action taken by the man, did that make him a dead man walking?  According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the cops tried to use non-lethal force, bean bags, beforehand.  Maybe a Taser would have worked better, but there’s no mention of that.

What the video shows clearly is that at the moment the officer opened fire, there was no threat of harm. There was a conundrum, for sure. There was a potential for the situation to change, perhaps at any second, but not at that specific moment.  And yet, the officer did open fire. And then his lemmings followed suit. And then the man was dead.

The typical reaction to this conundrum is, “but what are the cops supposed to do? They can’t just let him walk away.”  While true, the unsatisfying answer is that they can’t just kill him either. There are many tactics available for addressing the guy who won’t drop the knife, from establishing a perimeter he can’t physically cross to bringing in someone trained to talk a crazy off the ledge.

The point is that what they cannot do is kill, even a guy with a demonstrated potential to do harm, when no threat of harm is present.  It’s inconvenient, and it’s not that the guy did anything to help his situation. But still, they can’t shoot. Not even the lemmings.

*The San Francisco Chronicle has now provided a name for the dead man, Mario Woods, together with a recounting of his criminal history to remind readers that his life wasn’t worth getting too bent out of shape about.