Over the weekend, three officers shot five people over the course of 48 hours. The first shooting involved three teenagers in a truck, another was a teen shot after an alleged carjacking, and the fifth was shot when he refused to take his hands out his pockets.
During the truck incident, five teenagers were inside and had allegedly stolen a case of Heineken beer earlier in the evening. After being chased by officers, the truck eventually crashed. When a detective went to confront the driver, he says that the truck steered towards him and accelerated, prompting him to shoot.
“I’m not saying these kids are saints. They deserve to pay for what they did. But why do you have to try to kill them?” Jorge Cruz, one of the teen’s fathers, told the Miami Herald.
On Sunday afternoon, police shot a teenager who was fleeing from a stolen vehicle.
In another shooting on Sunday, a South Miami officer fired on a man who had refused to take his hands out of his pockets. He was charged with possession of marijuana and resisting arrest without violence, begging the question of whether it wasn’t safe to assume there was no need to use potentially deadly force.
On Tuesday, a sixth person was shot and did not survive. Police claim he had robbed a Wendy’s restaurant and then pointed a weapon at the responding officers following a foot chase.
The man killed in Tuesday’s encounter has only been identified as a black male. Two officers fired their weapons, but their names have also been withheld from the media.
