Another bad police shooting in our state

One aspect of the Derek Chauvin case almost all lawenforcement experts agree on is that 18 formal complaints filed by members of the public against the former Minneapolis police officer were a bright red flag that he would one day go way too far — fatally too far. He clearly had a tendency toward violence under the color of his uniformed authority.

If Chauvin had been stopped — disciplined, put on desk duty, fired — from his penchant for pushing citizens around, he would never have had the chance to murder George Floyd.

Here in California, police unions have succeeded in making it almost impossible to fire or even rein in rogue cops. A terrifying, Chauvinesque example comes from the East Bay, just a day after the Chauvin verdict, when the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office released a horrific video showing Officer Andrew Hall of affluent Danville fatally shoot Tyrell Wilson, 33, a homeless Black man, on a busy street last month.

Wilson was holding a very small knife blade in his right hand. But no one viewing the police body-cam footage would ever perceive him as in any way an actual threat to the officer, who suddenly shoots him from point-blank range in the face, killing him.

Here’s the kicker: the video was released mere hours before Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton filed two felony counts against Hall for a separate fatal shooting in 2018.

As the attorney for Wilson’s family quite rightly notes, the apparently mentally ill man would never have been killed if Hall had been charged sooner in the 2018 killing of unarmed Laudemer Arboleda, who San Francisco Chronicle reporter Rachel Swan writes “was slowly driving away from police when the officer fired 10 rounds into his car.”

There are too many bad police shootings perpetrated by too many highly armed officers trained well in the craft of pointing their handguns and pulling the trigger but trained not at all in the art of de-escalation. The California Legislature, hampered by police union ties through massive campaign donations, needs to redeem itself for past inaction by pressing for immediate reform of qualified immunity laws that overly coddle officers and leave too many citizens dead at their hands.