Screenshot of Guardian website report

The police recorder video released two weeks later showed that when seven policemen approached with weapons, McCartney came out of a unit of the building alone and walked into the corridor without threatening anyone, while the police who shot a fatal shot shot him within about 15 seconds after seeing him.

The Guardian website recently reported that McCartney's death caused panic in the United States, but this is not an exception. In recent years, the Los Angeles police have repeatedly shot people with ordinary items. They either mistook these items for weapons or thought they might be very dangerous. For example, some people only hold mobile phones, some hold lighters, and others hold bicycle parts, auto parts and boards.

Civil rights advocates and police experts said that while these shooting cases cost millions of dollars in settlement fees for taxpayers, they also exposed the persistent work defects of the Los Angeles police in responding to the police for help.

These events have something in common. For example, people shot by the police often experience psychological and mental distress. The 911 alarm information obtained by the police shows that these people carry weapons. However, according to the video of each incident, the police did not investigate and verify the accuracy of the information, leading to escalating contacts with these people suffering from psychological and mental distress, and hastily used lethal force without clear communication with the parties or other police.

In McCartney's case, someone reported that a "homeless person" had entered his studio in a warehouse building in a slum. According to the Los Angeles police, the police said that the intruder was "staggering" and "very dangerous", with a "stick" or "pole" in his hand. However, what the dispatcher reported by radio communication was "an attack with a deadly weapon", saying that the man "held a stick" and "attacked an employee" "under the action of (drugs or alcohol, etc.)".

The report points out that although reforms aimed at reducing the use of lethal force by the police have been carried out across the United States in the past decade, on the whole, more and more people die at the hands of the United States police every year. Many experts said that part of the reason was the training method of the American police.

"The identity of law enforcement officers has formed a way of looking at things, making mobile phones look like guns, cars look like weapons, and poverty is about equal to crime." James Nolan, a former police officer and professor of sociology at West Virginia University, analyzed and said, "This is an excessive awareness of danger, which puts the police and the community in danger."

Christopher Bou Saeed, a civil rights lawyer from Los Angeles, said that if more attention could be paid to other coping ways and means, if excessive use of force would be effectively punished, more similar tragedies could be avoided.

Michael, McCartney's brother, said the incident highlighted the need for the US police to take unarmed measures against people in crisis. "I hope people understand that this can happen to anyone." He said that McCartney has a bachelor's degree and a family full of love and support. "But now our family, like many other families, has lost relatives under police violence."

(Compiled by Gao Linlin and edited by Ma Rui and Han He)