Let's pretend the shooting was valid. You are allowed to use reasonable force to stop a threat. That doesn't mean death, death may happen but the force has to stop once the aggressor is no longer a threat.
Egh. If, in theory, I'm firing and I think there is a danger there 6 bullets ain't really excessive. I'm not saying these idiots were justified but there were eight cops.
If it was a valid shooting, then the number of shots is irrelevant.
8 officers and 51 shots is ~6 rounds per officer. That's not completely insane if you take into account how quickly someone can fire 6 rounds and addrenalin/the situation.
That's literally 2-3 seconds.
I'm not defending the cops one way or the other, but again, if we are stipulating that it's a "good shoot", then number of shots doesn't matter but even if it did, 51 rounds from 8 officers might be in the realm of reasonable (obviously depends on how you define reasonable).
What academy is teaching you to shoot two rounds then reassess??
You shoot to eliminate the threat. You don't shoot to kill, you don't shoot to wound, you don't aim for the leg, you don't take an arbitrary number of shots then pause.
Devil's advocate. Would one headshot be more justified than 51 random hurried shots? What amount of random hurried shots would have been justified in this situation? At what point during the shootings do you determine the suspect is no longer a threat?
These are all questions you're expecting cops to have a rational, logical answer to during a very intense, illogical situation that happens in mere seconds. You can armchair analyze these situations and come out with a better conclusion than the one that happened every time, but you have the comfort of not being a part of that situation.
8 cops all shooting at once would only need to fire 7 times and that even has a few misses. That could actually be done insanely quickly.
With that said, I don't think we need to play "devil's advocate" to justify this situation at all and I think it's highly inappropriate. Either the cops are highly trained professionals or they're scared idiots. If the police with all their 'training' can react like scared idiots then at least the same level of leeway should be given to the people they constantly assault.