Sign into an existing account

She was shooting a nigger with a gun, by far the most dangerous species out there

This is difficult for me. You can view a situation like this (i.e., cops called to a potentially lethal scenario where they're required to enter a private residence) from either perspective: the cops' or the suspects'.

Suppose the cops have reason to think that someone walking through the house in that context is dangerous. In that case, maybe the failure of the suspect to reasonably indicate their presence is enough to justify shooting on sight (it depends on the details in this case). If you're a cop signaling your presence, and you're calling out to anybody in the house capable of hearing you, then somebody walking around in the dark and ignoring your reasonable requests is plausibly dangerous.

To deny this would be tantamount to requiring that cops, even in these dangerous scenarios, have to wait for visual evidence of a lethal threat before they can take action. But if you're the cop, that might mean waiting for a gun to go off in the dark, a gun aimed at you. We have to expect that cops can utilize all of the information available, right? If you are walking around at night yelling, "Police, come out and identify yourself," and you suddenly see a shadowy, adult-sized figure approaching who is completely ignoring you, maybe you should be able to shoot.

That said, I would at least expect a verbal warning or something: "Stop. I'll shoot."

The broader point here is, there is no clean set of instructions for what's right that covers every case. Human violence is like water. It takes the shape and the features of the environment and the individuals involved.

If we're honest, being a cop and a suspect in this situation is a lot more like insurgent warfare than an ordinary traffic stop (but we expect cops to navigate these transitions competently). So, that's why people need to understand that any encounter with a cop is potentially dangerous (and potentially lethal). The more you move away from an encounter with cops in public in the daylight (toward cramped quarters in the dark), the more dangerous it becomes.

This makes it exceedingly important for cops to identify themselves. An innocent person won't be disposed to self-identifying if they don't know it's a cop creeping around the house.

It's all-around shitty, really. But this also makes it even more important to have the most highly trained, physically and psychologically competent people possible who have trained in high-stress scenarios. And they need to swiftly punish cops that do stupid shit like this. But that gets into a whole other ball of wax. They don't pay cops enough for these particular types of scenarios. You have someone who, on average, is busting up teens smoking weed at the park and issuing traffic citations, and then you put them in a hallway in gangland at midnight with a suspect who is possibly armed. The nature of the job is just so lopsided for the pay structure to incentivize getting the right people for the job. And even when you have the right people for the job, it's still a situation in which human beings are in a disagreeable scenario in which they fear for their lives.

We treat these things like they're going to go "by the book", when commonsense should tell us that the probability they won't is much higher. So, you should really just minimize your encounters with police. And when you have them, you should minimize the reasons they have to kill you.

Don't startle a cop in the dark. Still, women should never be cops.

This is America!

Or politicians, or a lot of things.