Police killed Jason Maccani as he held a fork, one of many cases of confused Los Angeles officers rushing to use lethal force
The first report from the Los Angeles police department about the killing of Jason Maccani on 3 February immediately drew scrutiny: an officer had fatally shot a man who had been “armed with a stick” and threatening people in a building on Skid Row, the department said.
LAPD’s update a day later raised new concerns: the 36-year-old Maccani hadn’t been holding any weapon, but rather a “white plastic fork”.
Body-camera footage released two weeks later raised even further questions about LAPD’s shifting narrative. The footage showed Maccani alone walking out of a unit into the building hallway, not threatening anyone, when seven officers approached with weapons drawn. The officer who fired the fatal shot opened fire within roughly 15 seconds of seeing him.
The description of the fork incident is pretty misleading. Maccani stormed up to the officers undeterred by multiple bean-bag rounds, holding the fork reversed so that it looked like a knife. Take 20 seconds and see for yourself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwXjrS9bPQ4
A better trained / equipped group may have been able to de-escalate / disarm him, but – unlike many other cases – they didn’t just wander up and shoot him for existing.