News out of Tampa, Florida is that another naked person has been shot by the police. Unlike in the previous case of the young University of South Alabama student, this woman appears to have been “armed.” I haven’t been able to find any more details about what that means (gun? knife? crowbar? etc). Maybe this woman was brandishing a gun or knife and represented a serious threat to innocent life. But the police will again look like the bad guys if she was doing anything less, especially since the use of non-deadly force would have been a real possibility in that instance.
It would be nice if we could have more faith in law enforcement making calls like this when trying to protect public safety. However, the gung-ho law enforcement community doesn’t give us a lot of confidence that they are using the minimal amount of force necessary to provide security and so we are rightly skeptical when we hear about cases like this one (especially after the South Alabama incident which almost certainly involved the excessive use of deadly force when other options were available at minimal extra risk).
[...] Police Shoot Naked Person, Again [...]