Unjustified

Imagine, you’re an inexperienced police officer in a suspicious neighborhood; suddenly a man dressed in dark clothes appears in your view. You make eye contact. You see him reach in his back pocket for what you think is a gun. Without even thinking, you shoot him. Then you think, was that the right thing to do? The short story Identitiesby W.D Valgardson is about a man from the good part of town who visits a bad part of town and gets caught up in an incident with the police. At the end of Identitiesthe police officer shoots and kills the man. Now the big question is: was the police officer justified to kill him? No, he was not. Although Winnipeg was the crime capitol of Canada, police officers should not make the assumption that every person that looks suspicious is suspicious. On the other hand, it is true that the man had suspicious thoughts and therefore may have been subconsciously acting suspicious, which could have triggered the officer’s feeling of being threatened. We know that the man has suspicious thoughts because by remembering a television show he decides, “That if he is accosted, he will say that the ten is all he’s got and that he stole the car and ask them if they know a buyer.” Secondly, there is no way to prove that the man was reaching for a gun. As a reader we know he was unarmed and in the moment with the police officer he, “Reaches his hand toward his wallet for his identity.” This proves the officer was unjustified to kill the man because he was in fact unarmed. Furthermore, the officer, “Who is inexperienced, who is nervous because of the neighborhood,” purely acted on instinct when he shot the man. The officer pulled the trigger because he felt nervous and inexperienced being in an unfamiliar area. Therefore, because the officer made the assumption that the man was suspicious when he was not, the officer felt threatened by the neighborhood he was in, not by the man just reaching to his pockets and that the man was unarmed proves that the officer was unjustified to kill the man.