Almost a month ago, a member of the Fremont Police Department killed a black man.  If you're wondering why you hadn't heard about this particular police shooting, it's because it didn't fit the narrative.  Joshua Gloria was a man wanted for armed robbery, and he managed to get off the first several shots.  The video the Fremont Police Department just released is illuminating, to say the least.

The trained Marxists at BLM are using the death of Adam "Lil Homicide" Toledo, the 13-year-old who had a gun in his hand when a police officer shot him in Chicago, as yet another excuse to fan the anti-police flames that burn so brightly in Democrat-run cities.  They say, as always, that the officer should have held his fire.  And as always, they miss entirely the realities of police reacting defensively to an imminent threat.

What happened on March 24 in Fremont, California (on the east side of the San Francisco Bay) shows how quickly events can spiral out of control when a suspect has a gun.  Fremont Police officer Burch was on duty on his motorcycle when he got word that a car had activated a License Plate Reader camera in the area.  Burch was wearing a body cam, so we can see with perfect accuracy what happened to him.

The car — which had been stolen — was wanted in connection with an armed robbery in San Francisco.  Officer Burch spotted the car and thought that he had managed to corral it in a parking lot.  Instead, the driver of the car (that is, Gloria) refused to pull over and headed to the freeway.

Officer Burch put on his siren and gave chase.  As he was driving, he reported to the dispatcher that the stolen car had a flat tire.  Almost immediately after Burch noticed this fact, Gloria got onto the freeway and pulled over.  Burch pulled up behind him.

That's when things get crazy — and they get crazy with extraordinary speed.  Here's what happened over the course of nine seconds: Gloria pulled over, and as he got out of the car, he began firing at Burch.  Burch leaped off his motorcycle and scrambled down the embankment next to the onramp.

Gloria, still holding his gun, headed for Burch's motorcycle.  Even as he scrambled down the embankment, Burch reached for his gun, turned around, and started firing.  This was an extremely reasonable thing to do, because at this point, Gloria had proven that he was willing to kill Burch, and Burch had no reason to believe that Gloria wouldn't still try for the kill shot.

As Burch began to fire at a distance of roughly 30 feet, Gloria ran from the motorcycle back to the stolen car.  By Burch's fifth shot, Gloria was down and dead.

As a reminder, things didn't go that well recently in New Mexico.  Back in February, when Officer Darian Jarrott did a routine traffic stop, pulling over Omar Felix Cueva, a man with a violent criminal history, Cueva jumped out of his truck with a rifle in his hand and shot Jarrott.  When the wounded officer hit the ground, Cueva continued with an execution-style shooting, including a shot at point-blank range to the back of the head.  I couldn't watch the video.  It's too awful.

Jarrott was down and dead in seconds, and, again, Burch's entire encounter took less than ten seconds.  Significantly, during those fraught seconds, as Burch fired, he had no way of knowing from that distance whether his shots were actually hitting the driver or were just distracting him enough to keep him from firing at Burch.

For that reason, Burch needed to have multiple rounds in his magazine.  If Burch had had just one or two bullets, which is what leftists envision for any situation in which people fire a gun, there's a good chance Burch would have missed those first shots, only to find himself again on the receiving end of the driver's bullets.

The man who'd tried to kill Burch was Joshua James Gloria, 34, a man wanted for a violent crime and a man who was perfectly willing to kill a police officer to avoid imprisonment.  When the officer who first got to Lil Homicide in Chicago saw a gun in the kid's hand, he had every reason to believe that the person with the gun would try to shoot him.  Likewise, in Kenosha, when Jacob Blake went for a knife, officers were also at immediate risk.

For officers, unless someone is totally cooperative, and clearly unarmed, that someone is as dangerous as a bobcat.

The rule, always, is that if you don't want the police to kill you, cooperate.  Unless the police officers truly are psychopaths, you will survive the interaction.  But criminals who foresee a prison term are willing to take their chances and often pay the ultimate price.

Image: Shots fired.  YouTube screen grab.

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