“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.
“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.
