This shooting incident may have indeed been justified. Happening a month after Michael Brown, Vonderitt Myers was shot and killed by an off-duty STL police officer who was moonlighting as a security guard. That raises difficult questions over the circumstances of the shooting and the STL area police departments have no leeway in addressing excessive force and officer-involved shooting; there’s no goodwill between the community and police because of the fact that the police still don’t recognize that they’ve done the community wrong and that they are racially profiling blacks and minorities and that unarmed blacks are being killed by officers.

The police union has released some information about the case, and it would tend to support the STL PD contention that this was a justified shooting. Gunshot residue was found on Myers’ hands and inside the waistband of his pants.

The Missouri Highway Patrol analysis found gunshot residue on Myers’ hands, on his shirt and inside the waistband and pockets of his jeans. Police said that although gunshot residue can be present on anyone near a shooting, the results show levels consistent with Myers being the shooter, because the police officer was standing too far away.

Ballistics evidence also revealed three bullets that hit the ground where the officer was trying to take cover matched Myers’ gun. A round found inside a car behind the officer was too badly damaged to be able to to match it to his gun, however, it did not match the type of bullets the officer fired, police said.

Several photographs showing Myers holding three guns, including one that looked like the stolen Smith & Wesson gun recovered at the scene, circulated on social media after his death. The police officer’s attorney, Brian Millikan, said that his client recognized both Myers and the distinctive, two-tone semiautomatic in the pictures.

Here’s the full release on #VonderritMyers gun powder residue test results: pic.twitter.com/WUeoWoJKQy

— Jessica Lussenhop (@Lussenpop) October 14, 2014

A lot of the “witness” claims that Myers was unarmed came from people who weren’t at the scene of the incident, but second hand information only after the shooting occurred. This is unlike the Brown case, where multiple contemporaneous witnesses were saying that Brown was unarmed and his hands were up when he was fatally shot by Officer Wilson.

Each of these officer involved shooting / excessive force cases has to be taken individually to address the facts and circumstances unique to each. The community has a right to prompt information about these cases, and uniform treatment of how the cases will be investigated (it’s exceptionally difficult to police the police, let alone prosecute law enforcement when both are often on the same side and looking out for each other in a symbiotic manner). Moving towards an automatic independent prosecutor to investigate these cases from the ground up - and set clear methods for handling all evidence in the case is a good idea.