Slaying in Minneapolis: Justine Damond, shooting cultures and race

The suggestion that Damond might have been on medication, let alone any bodily impurity, sparked something of a tussle: the world of clean living against that of the mind altering nightmare. A pure Australian, battling a contaminated culture. "Justine," claimed the family spokesman Tom Hyder, "was someone who only ate organic, she watched everything she ever put into her body. She is not someone who would have used drugs."

Heads have rolled. Police chief Janeé Harteau is, thus far, the most prominent scalp. Her own period had been marked by allegations of inappropriate handling regarding previous police shootings, notably that of Jamar Clark.

Mayor Hodges insisted that Harteau hang up her hat as chief. "I've lost confidence in the Chief's ability to lead us further… It is clear that she has lost the confidence of the people of Minneapolis as well."

So, it would seem, have residents in Minneapolis with the whole law enforcement apparatus, having found reform in the police force lethargic at best, superficial at worse. Whether Damond's death is accounted for in a legal sense will come down to the acceptable use of force by police, one governed by that ever precarious standard of "reasonableness". (Can a shooter ever be reasonable?)

In the US, the threshold on such reasonableness is so ground touchingly low as to be liberatingly violent. "People just say, if a person was unarmed," complained Jim Bueermann, former police chief of Redlands in California, "why would an officer have shot him or her?" Best, then, never to call, approach or consult an officer on duty.