“Identities” Paragraph

Can one be guilty of another, or is another guilty themselves? In the story “Identities” by W.D. Valgardson, a question rises when a cop shoots and kills a man in a sketchy street, the man had no intentions of harming the cop in any way, but his actions led to his life ending, after the man was instructed to stop by the cop, the man stopped and reached for his pocket to get his wallet in order to identify himself, but the cop shot him, thinking he was going to be hurt by the man. The man should not have died because he tried to get his identity out, the cop suspected something far worse and that didn’t need to happen. The cop was new to the job, so he was inexperienced and nervous, “When the officer, who is inexperienced, who is nervous…” and when the man reached for his wallet, the cop got overwhelmed, a cop has to go through training to gain knowledge for likely situations, he should have learned to remain calm. How the cop was nervous and had lack of experience does not justify why he killed that man. Being under a sketchy neighborhood stressed the cop out because criminals surround it but, just because it’s labeled as that, it does not mean that every person is bad or sketchy themselves, “…who is nervous because of the neighborhood”, the cop assumed that the man was bad too, but it was just because of his surroundings and the way he looked, the officer assumed wrong. It is not a justifiable excuse for the cop to have shot the man for being in a questionable place. The cop shouldn’t have shot the man for assuming the wrong things, and he should have been more calm for the situation he was under, because of the training he had spent to earn his position as a police officer.