Story about the killing: https://abcnews.go.com/US/ohio-deputy-fatally-struck-man-son-shot-police/story?id=121438975
Breakdown of bodycam video: https://eu.cincinnati.com/story/news/2025/05/04/body-cam-review-ryan-hinton-fatal-cincinnati-police-shooting-2025/83443906007/
I don’t think the chief’s identification of the “gun” in the freeze frame is really beyond a reasonable doubt. I’d be fine with it if we could see the bodycam after the shooting, showing the cop going up to the kid and the gun next to him. Since if he was holding it while running, where else would it be other than roughly in the same place as that random patch of pixels?
A link to the story might help get things started
Done
Understandable but not justifiable.
Why not?
Yeah. Like I say, I get it. I can’t even imagine watching a video of your son getting killed like that.
No, killing the policeman a day after he killed your son is not justified. Regardless of if the shooting was justified or not.
The reason we have courts is to stop revenge attacks like this because the participants aren’t in a position to make a fair judgement.
However its completely understandable why he killed the cop the next day.
Well, you didn’t define justified for this purpose, so there’s two ways to look at it, imo
One is the standard concept of justifiable homicide, and this doesn’t meet that criteria. There were other options, there was no immediate danger, etc.
But that’s not the only way we’re allowed to look at whether or not someone could kill and it be an acceptable choice.
I personally believe that a parent avenging their child, even when the child is an adult, is one of those things where even if they’re wrong, and provably so, it isn’t exactly a cold blooded murder, even if it was premeditated. There’s just too big of an emotional punch to having one’s family killed. That doesn’t mean it’s automatically acceptable, it just means there’s room for the decision to be something that is excusable eventually. And yes, that concept would apply to the parents of a person killed by the parent of a previous killing. I’m not saying it’s good, I’m not saying it should be a get out of jail card, I’m just saying that the motive involved is compelling enough to be worthy of consideration.
Now, justified or acceptable in this case? The chances of the officer that killed their child getting off no matter what the evidence was is there. That the decision was made after seeing the footage in person definitely makes a charge of aggravated murder dubious.
However, as far as I’ve seen after checking the provided links, and searching for other articles, the parent in this case didn’t go after the person who shot their child. They, in a highly charged emotional state, targeted a random officer.
The ever heated debate over whether or not cops are an omnipresent threat to begin with can’t apply here because this isn’t what that was. This wasn’t a reaction to cops in general made as an act of revolution or protest. Well, it doesn’t seem that way based on the chain of events.
It may have been the proverbial straw, and the father was starting a campaign to take out police in general, but it’s such a recent event that no motivation has been stated by him. If it does come out, maybe it would change things, I dunno
But it looks more like he came out of seeing his son killed by cops, then saw a cop standing there alive, and directed his grief and rage at the officer, despite there being no reason to believe that officer is the one that killed his son. That cop that killed his son was part of a specific unit, and wouldn’t have been out directing traffic.
So if we want to say that a parent avenging their child is justifiable, it’s a massive stretch to apply it in this case. It wouldn’t really be vengeance on a scale and in a way that I can personally find totally excusable. At most, I would say that it should be a more limited charge, and a lighter sentence.
If someone wanted to say that any killing of a cop is automatically justified, I’m not going to debate it because it goes beyond this specific situation, and OP didn’t ask about it. I will say that pretty much no killing is automatically justified, but even that’s tangential to the post.
My personal view is that violence is only justified in narrow conditions of self defense—and I define self-defense more narrowly than many people do in common parlance. So while I understand the injustice and rage the father might feel, I can’t see how this was defensive in nature and so I would have to say it was the wrong thing to do.
I would be inclined to be lenient here but I don’t really believe in punitive justice anyway since it’s not generally a defensive form of violence. But particularly in this case, the father had very legitimate grievance and the chance of re-offending seems low barring additional information. A restorative justice model seems especially appropriate here.
I agree it is not good case for self defense, but what if we look at it as a case of protest? In this case violet protest against an injustice that otherwise would not have been acted on.
What does justice mean in this context and how is that worth more than a human life?
I am unconvinced by the case for killing as an act of protest generally, but I haven’t thought as deeply about this as I maybe should. So I’d like to hear the case for it.
First a clarification about justice: in this case I meant justice in the eyes of the father. What I mean by this is that most likely the officer responsible would not have been charger with any crime, would most likely not even be fired from work.
How is justice worth more than a human life?
I do not think it is, but I think you are equating the current state of violence with no violence done, and as we can read a officer killed a child. So let me ask you how is a badge worth more than a human life? We see the father on the stand waiting for his sentence? Where is the sentence for killing a literal child?
I understand all of this. If by justice you mean punishment then as I mentioned I reject that moral framework. Harming people is bad, even the guilty. So there needs to be enough good to offset this.
This is where I’m hoping you can elaborate. I’m aware of the atrocities of the US police system. But how does that connect to this action in a moral sense? Are you saying killing this cop will make that situation better somehow? I’m not sure I see how.
Harming people is bad, even the guilty. So there needs to be enough good to offset this.
The good is that you are stopping these people from hurting other innocents. This is not exactly the case here, because the killed cop was not at all connected to the earlier murder, I agree. But from a system point of view, protesting police brutality and police violence even with violet means is justifiable if that will prevent greater suffering caused by the police, no?
If you could prove that, then yes. I don’t really see how this event will lead to less police brutality though. Only an organized political movement could achieve that. With this action, another cop will be hired to replace the one killed and the system will go on unchanged.
Violent protest sounds fine, in some circumstances.
https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/police-precinct-minneapolis/
I more or less agree with that; I think that especially given the history of widespread peaceful protest against police brutality which clearly didn’t do a damn thing to keep George Floyd alive, and given the clear mandate of millions of people in the streets, burning down the 3rd precinct sent a message which had quite a bit to do with changing the culture of policing and the conversation in the years that followed. “A little revolution every now and then is a healthy thing.”
This wasn’t that. This is just one guy deciding to kill some random person who wasn’t from the same department, after some other cop from a different department had a perfectly reasonable reaction to being put in a life-threatening violent situation. It sucks for all concerned, I understand his reaction as a human thing, but a cop who breaks a suspect’s nose because he wouldn’t stop mouthing off and trying to kick him or something, that’s a human reaction too. We all need to keep our reactions in check sometimes.
Overall agree, but
We all need to keep our reactions in check sometimes.
I do not think this is a sufficiently damming for the situation. A father will spend a lot of years in prison if not the rest of his life, a son will never graduate, never have a girlfriend or boyfriend, never have kids, a mother will be left without half her family in just 2 days! Mere hours and your whole life changes. The cop as well it is a shame, his grandkids would never again see their grandpa, it is heartbreaking all of it…
Second thing: We can see this is a systemic issues and require systemic changes
We all need to keep our reactions in check sometimes. Sound like “there are a few bad apples” story about the police and it’s just not true, there are big systemic problems with the police in the US(and other places) and use of lethal force.
Random violence is never the answer! But violence(preferably not against people) IMO is a perfectly good form of protest.
A father will spend a lot of years in prison if not the rest of his life, a son will never graduate, never have a girlfriend or boyfriend, never have kids, a mother will be left without half her family in just 2 days!
Yeah. It is heartbreaking. End of the world.
For people to debate you, you need to make a claim. Asking a question doesn’t work.
To answer your question. No it wasn’t justified.
Understandable? Sure. But not justified.
There is no good justification for revenge killing. It’s literally just a version of “Because I felt like it.”The deputy he ran over, wasn’t even the police officer that shot his son. Those are different and unrelated agencies. So he didn’t even get revenge properly. He just murdered a random cop. Because he felt like it.
Yeah. Generally I agree with you (on both counts).
I didn’t have time for an extensive debate and so I just threw the topic out there in hopes everyone would fight it out in the comments. It actually seems overall very reasonable so far. But I do think it’s better if the person posting the question takes some particular side or other.
And yes, killing some random deputy because your son got himself killed while running around with a gun committing felonies is going to accomplish nothing of value at all. It’s completely understandable, but it’s also completely wrong.
Context would be useful for those handful of people who live outside Ohio and are not up to date on local news.
It’s in the post body, there were some news stories.
I don’t know if the shooting was justified. If we assume that the cops are telling the truth that the kid had a gun in his right hand when he popped out from between the dumpsters, I think it was justified. I want to see the full bodycam footage to make sure there is a gun next to the kid on the ground when they go up to him after the shooting, but that’s my first reaction seeing the video. The bodycam footage shows the applicable part, but it is too fuzzy for me to see anything other than a vague blotch of pixels that the cops are saying was a gun of an unusual color. Basically whether or not the kid had a gun at that point and the cop is telling the truth about why he reacted like he did is the key issue there.
Regardless of that, running over the cop was unjustified. For one thing, he wasn’t even from the same department. For another thing, this never helps.
I get it. Any father in that situation would react like that, on some level. It honestly doesn’t even really matter if his son was “guilty” or not. I can’t even imagine. I get it. But this will not make justice, it won’t make the police behave, it won’t motivate politics or mass opinion to sympathize with your side and make things better. It will give ammunition for the next ten years for anyone who wants the police to be able to do the same to you.
A man’s son was killed by a gang and he killed a gang member who had no direct connection to the killing.
I find it hard to blame the father. If you’re part of a gang involved in murder you should expect retribution.
