Hmmm ... the headline made me think they were focusing on the shootings OF police officers and I was stunned to think the Washington ComPost might actually publish a balanced thoughtful piece of journalism but upon actually reading the article, I was reassured that the sun will rise in the east, the moon will continue to orbit the Earth for eons, and the ComPost will be reflexively liberal. It does the usual trick of sort-of telling the other side much further down in the article so they can claim "balance" but the presentation upfront (which is typically the only part most people read) is firmly weighted: "police gunned down a 17-year-old girl joyriding", "police shot an elderly man after his son asked them to make sure he was okay", "these shootings, many of which began as minor incidents and suddenly escalated into violence", "shot three times by Denver police officers as she and a carload of friends allegedly tried to run them down", etc.

The three tidbits you pulled out are good bits in a well-written but flawed article. The context they added to the shootings was incomplete and designed to reinforce their underlying thesis: that police are out of control. I have no doubt they classified Michael Brown as an "unarmed victim" when the reality is he was a violent thug who showed lethal potential without weaponry.

I would add a fourth observation from the article: law enforcement needs more less-lethal options for certain situations. By "law enforcement", I mean the whole panoply of people who are charged with maintaining an orderly society. There is probably a limited role for some community service officers who can provide first stage response to some of the probably non-lethal situations like general welfare checks. I have no doubt there is an aspect of the hammer syndrome in this (when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail) but I also suspect it's applicable in only a small minority of cases and we would see an increase in officer casualties so we as a society would need to weight the opposing costs and benefits.

One of the questions I don't see being asked by most of the media is, what price are we as a society willing to pay. I'm pretty sure Darren Wilson thought he was in a "minor incident" of getting some pedestrians to walk in a safer zone than the middle of the street when the situation "suddenly escalated into violence" and I don't think he's the one who escalated into violence from his car seat. The media elite don't want Americans defending themselves, saying the police can handle it all, then they proceed to try to demonize and castrate the police but are shocked and surprised when crime goes up as in Baltimore.

Question for the cops on this board: have you seen much or any media doing ride-alongs? It seems to me reporters who covered the crime beat 50 years ago were more familiar with the daily situations faced by the cops. How prevalent are media "embeds" in law enforcement these days?