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LA Police Killing of Unarmed Man ‘Completely Avoidable’ - Policy Group

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Urban Institute Justice Policy Fellow John Roman said that Los Angeles police gunning down an unarmed homeless man on Skid Row could have been avoided if police had not rushed in and escalated the situation with aggressive tactics.

A pedestrian walks past flowers and candles placed on a sidewalk near where a man was shot and killed by police in the Skid Row section of downtown Los Angeles - Sputnik International
Police Confirm Homeless Man Gunned Down by LAPD Officers Was Black
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) — Los Angeles police gunning down an unarmed homeless man on Skid Row could have been avoided if police had not rushed in and escalated the situation with aggressive tactics, Urban Institute Justice Policy Fellow John Roman told Sputnik.

“My general reaction is that it’s another incident of an unarmed person being killed by law enforcement that was completely avoidable,” Roman said on Monday. “If they had gone slower, it wouldn’t have escalated and we wouldn’t have ended up here.”

These situations do not need to escalate as they have in Ferguson, in Staten Island, Cleveland and now in Los Angeles, according to Roman. But police officers brought a lot of force to bear in a short period of time that caused the incident to escalate.

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Roman, who directs crime and justice policy research for the US District of Columbia’s Mayor’s Office, said the situation is analogous to the incident in Cleveland, Ohio, when overzealous police shot and killed 12-year old Tamir Rice.

“Tactically, we fly in, we pull our guns, hit somebody with a baton, we taze them, and then everybody starts shooting. That’s what happened here and it seemed unnecessary,” Roman explained.

The Urban policy expert expressed skepticism that any of the officers would be held accountable for the killing of the homeless man in Los Angeles.

“At the end of the day, when they do the investigation, are these officers going to be found to not be culpable? Are they going to be found to have behaved appropriately? The answer is probably that they are, and the same thing happened in Ferguson,” Roman concluded.

The Los Angeles incident is the latest example of excessive use of force by US police that spurred a wave of protests in the United States in 2014 calling for police accountability.

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