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opinion

John T. Williams was a carver, from a line of carvers seven generations long. The 50-year-old aboriginal from British Columbia was walking on a Seattle street with his knife and his wooden board when he was shot dead by a rookie police officer. A local newspaper reported that, based on a police photo, the folding three-inch knife could be carried legally under Seattle law. Such a knife can also be a lethal weapon, but reports suggest Mr. Williams was merely crossing the street at a crosswalk when approached by Officer Ian Birk. The police initially announced that Mr. Williams had lunged toward the officer, but have since backed away from that allegation. Officer Birk asked Mr. Williams three times to drop the knife, then shot him four times from a distance of three metres, police say.

It is a death reminiscent of Robert Dziekanski's, at the hands of four Mounties, who tasered the distressed Polish immigrant five times at the Vancouver International Airport in October, 2007. An officer may have rushed to resolve a perceived problem that could have been handled with patience and common sense. Mr. Williams has a history of homelessness, and had been living in a home for long-term alcoholics. The officer never called for backup. Some people who knew Mr. Williams say he was partly deaf, and had cognitive problems; whatever the case, unless he posed an immediate danger to the officer's life, there was no justification to shoot him at all, let alone four times.

There is a police video that may have caught some of the incident though not the shooting, and, separately, an audio recording; the police have not seen fit to make those public. It was a bystander's video that exploded the falsehoods told by the RCMP about the supposed violent action of Mr. Dziekanski, which turned out to be that he was harmlessly holding an office stapler, though not brandishing it. The police should release any video and audio they have. The Seattle police are investigating themselves, and that is not a recipe for an impartial or effective investigation.

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