Video of recent police shooting in Phoenix, AZ, provides timely, real-world demonstration of the actions and decisions Collier County Sheriff’s Office deputies could have made to avoid unnecessarily taking the life of the devoted, single father of a 12-yr old boy in Immokalee’s farmworker village last year…

Video comes in wake of dismal Citizens Review Panel (CRP) meeting in Naples where panel abdicated oversight role, rubber stamped exoneration of officers involved in last year’s brutal killing of Nicolas Morales (more to come on that front soon…)

Earlier this year, we shared the news of a California District Attorney who charged a police officer with the San Leandro Police Department in September of 2020 with felony manslaughter for what the DA called the “unreasonable use of deadly force.” In arriving at her decision to prosecute, the DA found that the officer’s “failure to attempt other de-escalation options… rendered his use of deadly force unreasonable and a violation” of state law. You can see our original post on that case, comparing Nicolas Morales’s killing at the hands of Corporal Pierre Jean of the Collier County Sheriff’s Office to the killing in California — and, most importantly, comparing the differing decisions regarding the criminal liability of the officers involved made by the Florida State Attorney, in Nicolas’s case, and by her counterpart in the California District Attorney’s office — here.

The lesson from the CA shooting is as obvious as it is simple: The use of deadly force by a police officer can only be considered reasonable when it is deployed as a last resort, because to kill another human being when it was fully possible not to do so is wrong, whether the killer was wearing a uniform or not.

Today, we’d like to share news of yet another similar (though, thankfully, not fatal) police shooting that recently took place in Phoenix, Arizona. In particular, we’d like to share a video from that shooting that raises the question of how the officers involved in Nicolas’s killing could have acted differently to avoid needlessly taking another human being’s life. Like the California case, the Phoenix video is an invaluable reminder of the awesome power over life and death that we have vested in each and every police officer across this country, of the solemn responsibility those officers have to only use that power as a last resort, and of what we must do when that responsibility is abused.

Over on the CIW site today, we share both videos: the first the sadly familiar footage of Nicolas’s shooting, the second the shooting in Phoenix. Again, we understand that it is difficult — indeed, extremely painful — to watch these videos. We warn readers for whom the trauma of witnessing this horrific violence might be, in fact, too painful, against viewing them. But we present this comparison in the interest of understanding exactly why Nicolas’s killing was entirely preventable, and why his killers should be held accountable for their actions, because the officers’ actions cannot be adequately analyzed without taking fully into account the back and forth between action and response, between police officers and the people against whom they use deadly force. In the final analysis, neither the officers’ nor the civilians’ behavior can be properly understood in a vacuum, and the comparison of these two videos provides an invaluable reminder of that essential truth.