Quote:
Originally Posted by qzar9999
The legal climate these days being what it is, cops generally shoot to kill. If you wound them and leave them alive they'll often try to sue.
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"They'll have relatives. THey always do."
--The Old Man in Robocop 2.
The logic is a touch simpler than that. It's not so much shoot to kill as it is shoot not to miss. Center of body mass is a much easier target to hit and much, much more likely to stop the bullet. This keeps the collateral damage down. As hard as it is to explain why a police officer shot anyone, it's got to be worse explaining why a bystander got whacked because the officer was trying to be fancy. This makes shooting weapons out of hands a non-starter.
This case, as described, strikes me as one where the police could have just hit the kid with a nightstick and has me thinking of the old saw where if you have a hammer all problems are nails.