Are we really going to sit here and pretend there's no alternative to police gunning down teenager

[Ms. Toad]

90. The girl first swung the knife at another girl right in front of him.

He did not shoot her at that time. (The appropriate call - there is no way he could have identified the knife, assessed the threat, and safely aimed.) This other person is the girl in the foreground below, so you can see how close the girl with the knife came to the police, giving him an up-close view of the knife.

The shots were fired after she pivoted and took off after a second girl. They were fired simultaneously with her swinging the arm with a knife at a second girl who was pinned between the girl who was shot and a car.

As for being blurry - I'm sure you've had the experience of pointing your camera (or cell phone) at something that is crystal clear to your eyes - and the photo comes out blurry. The same thing happens with videos - videos are thousands and thousands of stills that are stitched together so that the single frame nature of the images is not apparent to the naked eye. They are very good - but are still subject to the limitations of motion (of the camera and what is being filmed), lighting, etc. It generally much easier to see in person that watching a grainy video taken via a camera placed on a moving body. Eyes are far more sophisticated than cameras; the camera is just a tool to confirm what the police say they saw.

But here's the knife - and it is pretty clear (top center pane).



It is a tragedy. But given the clear threat in that moment to the girl in pink, I can't fault the choice made by that officer.

That said, it is a preventable tragedy - we must do better at providing resources to help families, finding ways to respond other than sending in people with guns, training both police and communities in de-escalation tactics, and more, so that we don't repeatedly - especially in black and brown commmunities - find ourselves in the situation in which someone with a gun has to make a split second decision as to whether to shoot one person to save the life of another.