Marcus -
"gets nervous"? The person was driving a stolen vehicle and tried to hit the cop. Would you be nervous. Oh, maybe the cop should have let the idiot hit him with the car before pulling his gun. Give me a break. Lets do more to protect the CRIMINALS while at the same time 'handcuff' law enforcement with less officers and less resources.

And did officers "know what they signed up for" when they applied for the job? Yes. Did they know it was dangerous? Yes. DID THEY SIGN UP TO ALLOW IDIOTS IN STOLEN VEHICLES TO RUN THEM OVER? No.

Yeah, and cops love 'profiling' people based on urban/hip-hop manners. Do you realize that 1/2 of all the police departments staff was hired in the last 5-7 years. That means this same group of people hired grew up listening to hip-hop. But keep playing the race card...let me know how that works out for you.

The only line of your comment which make any sense is where you said Ms. Killings "should pay for her crimes". She is. And I hope this is a wake up call to other criminals.

Thank you SLPD for all your hard work, even though people like Marcus don't think so. I pay taxes and I think your doing a great job.

Given that the police managed not to shoot her companion, I doubt she was shot due to her race, and also probably not simply because she stole the car (as the companion would just as likely have been charged with car theft/accessory). Because of that evidence she was not shot simply because she was a car thief, it seems plausible that she was shot for revving up the car. Hence the lack of outrage. Along with a general exhaustion, especially amongst Broadmoor residents with crime and criminals.

David, the companion left the car and it was a different policeman who ran after him. And yes, it may have been because she revved the car, but I'm sure that fact - given that she couldn't go anywhere - was not the only one at play.

I wonder. If I well remember the guy was released within a couple of days of the car theft/shooting.

As for ulterior motives, the problem I have is that given what we know, the cop shouldn't have shot the victim, she was not posing a danger to anyone. Whatever motive he had for shooting her is not the motive he claimed he had. So we are only left to speculate about it. That's why I'm hoping there will be an investigation that will explain what went wrong here.

And, btw, in my book homicide is a worse crime than car theft - so the cop is more guilty than the victim.

Let's see what information we have. We know the cop killed the victim. He is guilty of ending a person's life. He may or may not have had a reason for it. The evidence so far does not seem to support that she was posing a danger to anyone.

We know that the woman was driving a stolen car. We don't know why that was the case, but even if she stole it, in my book (and most books from Hamurabi down) killing a human being is graver an offense than stealing from one.

How do you figure? Isn't the mens rea by definition linked to the actus reus?

which is why I've never used the word "murder" (I think, I'm not re-reading all of this :) but "homicide". You may be guilty of justifiable homicide but inasmuch as you actually killed a human being and that guilty is not substantially different from responsible, I think it's appropriate to use the word.

David, "guilty" was your word not mine. We don't know "yet" whether the officer in question will be considered guilty of homicide. We will never know whether the driver was guilty of car theft - she's dead, she'll never have a trial. So given that we can't measure criminal liability for either of them, we're left with the nature of their crime. We can presume them both innocent or guilty, but if we do the latter then I'd say that the cop is guiltier than the victim (morally, if you'd like) because what he did was worse.

David, so your supposition is that the policeman basically executed her because she was a car thief. Might be, of course - but that would not make it justifiable homicide.

Tim, the comments were actually on the main Patch page, not on this thread. I hope they're still there. I talked to Kari and Jill and found out that the Patch is not planning to enforce the rule against pseudonyms - regardless of how obvious, offensive or profanity-filled they may be. Basically, East Bay Citizen denizens are welcome to come here and post under whichever alias they want.

They will, however, remove comments that they don't like or they disagree with, even if they fully comply with stated Patch policy. What I understood is that if they see a comment they dislike they'll delete it, but won't be actually looking at all comments, so what stays and what goes will be a crapshoot.

More troubling, however, is that what came out of my conversations is that they want the Patch to be a nice, friendly, tra-la-la community website, where serious issues are not discussed and nobody says anything that might offend or antagonize anyone else. So they are going to be concentrating on fluffy, positive stories and not really uncovering anything. I'm disappointed, of course, but I guess we still have San Leandro Bytes and San Leandro Rumours and the Zocalo news/gossip mill :)

It's very disappointing that Patch is not intending to enforce their own rule against anonymity rule. Why do they thing the rule exists? I hope they will reconsider.

Jill can you chime in here on the thinking?

It is my long held belief, and I have a good 20 years experience in managing online communities, that it is one of the few things that keeps come commenters from becoming outrageously insulting, homophobic, mysogystic, racist, etc. as has become the norm at the East Bay Citizen.

Jill/Kari said that it would be too hard to enforce, i.e. they would have to spend resources (even if minimal) that they rather spend elsewhere. In this particular case, I explained to them why Jim Faqu was clearly a false name (e.g. Farquaz is not a real last name, if you google it you'll find no real references to anyone with that surname, there is nobody with that last name on Facebook, no Farquaz appears in the white pages and nobody with that last name is registered to vote in Alameda County), but they didn't care. Kari said outright that she is fine with people posting under any alias. So yes, I expect that this site would become EBC but for the fact that they are unlikely to put any stories with any meat on it.