Police shot and killed an eighth-grader in the hallway of his middle school Wednesday after the boy brandished what looked like a handgun and pointed it at officers. It turned out to be a pellet gun that closely resembled the real thing.

Fifteen-year-old Jaime Gonzalez “had plenty of opportunities to lower the gun and listen to the officers’ orders, and he didn’t want to,” Interim Police Chief Orlando Rodriguez said.

Shortly before the confrontation, the boy had walked into a classroom and punched a random boy in the nose for no apparent reason, police said. Investigators did not know why he pulled out the weapon.

“We think it looks like this was a way to bring attention to himself,” the police chief said. He said the officers’ actions were justified and no one else was hurt.

…

Gonzalez Sr. was struggling to reconcile the day’s events, saying his son seemed to be doing better in school and was always helpful around the neighborhood mowing neighbors’ lawns, washing dogs and carrying his toolbox off to fix other kids’ bikes.

Both he and his wife, Noralva, questioned why police repeatedly shot at their son and called the shooting unjustified.

“Why was so much excess force used on a minor?” he asked. “Three shots. Why not one that would bring him down?”

His wife, who demanded that the officers be punished, added: “What happened was an injustice.”

I’m beginning to question the competency of officers who can’t distinguish a pellet gun from a real gun or can’t figure out that maybe an 8th grader isn’t the same as a hardened criminal.

Cops depend on wages and salaries like the rest of us—that is true. They might have a series of grievances against their ranking officers and the government.

But every cop knows that the moment they publicly sympathize with a people’s movement, or refuse to carry out repressive order, they will be out of work. They understand that part of their job is to stop the people from rising up.

Rank-and-file soldiers in the military, who typically serve only for a few years, have at several key historical moments defected, torn off their uniforms, and switched back to the workers’ side in large numbers. Professional police officers, who have chosen to join that institution of repression as their life’s work, almost never do.

Can several truths about the police co-exist? I believe so. It is possible to be protected by police, just as it is possible to be brutalized. But that police are emboldened by legal authority to enact force—and in the United States this includes lethal, militarized weapons of war—makes the police, to put it in colloquial idiom, “not your friend.”

Watch the videos of this dick giving a protestor a concussion and then arresting a female for not following his telepathic orders.