A story in the San Jose Mercury News today on the video we published yesterday here on Boing Boing, which shows an Oakland Police officer shooting a photographer with a projectile, for no apparent reason.
Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminal justice professor who’s an expert in police decision-making and use of force, said the video left him "astonished, amazed and embarrassed."
"Unless there’s something we don’t know, that’s one of the most outrageous uses of a firearm that I’ve ever seen," he said. "Unless there’s a threat that you can’t see in the video, that just looks like absolute punishment, which is the worst type of excessive force."