Further Down the Laurel County Rabbit Hole…
By 
Continuing to pay attention to this not so much because of its intrinsic importance (although an innocent man is dead because of this nonsense) as to what it says about the politics and economics of policing in the United States…
New information also shows the reason that brought officers to Harless’s street the night of the shooting was a stolen weed eater.
That detail comes from a KSP search warrant filed after the shooting. It also reveals when officers knocked on Harless’s door and didn’t get an answer, they forced their way in.
That’s when London police say Harless pointed a gun at them.
There was some discussion in comments to the previous post about what to do when armed men are banging on your door in the middle of the night, but as far as I’m concerned this absolve Harless completely; officers banged on his door at 11:30pm, and when he didn’t make it to the door in time they entered his residence forcibly. Harless probably didn’t have time to even contemplate the question of whether these were officers of the court before he picked up his gun and then got himself shot. The responsibility here lies entirely with the police.
This is also interesting:
On a macro level there’s lots to quibble with here and if we had the entire London Police Department budget in front of us we could evaluate how the department thought about its priorities. However… being part of both an HOA and a small academic department this explanation makes complete sense to me. “Technology” is expensive, involves ongoing costs of maintenance and update, breaks often, and (most importantly) becomes rapidly obsolete. As I often say during department and HOA meetings, “Sure; we can buy that gizmo, but it will be obsolete in two years and in a year no one will remember how to use it or how to get it properly updated.” I totally get why looking at the costs and benefits in isolation it made sense to discontinue the camera policy. What that means in a policy sense is that budgetary decisions on body worn cameras need to come at the federal and state level rather than that of the county or municipality.