What follows really is not an excuse for the officer's actions. It really isn't because what happened is, well, inexcusable. But with that, with the verbal commands caught on the recording, I believe the officer thought she had taken out her Taser and not her firearm.
And as I mentioned in another thread, under high levels of stress, the body and mind can go through some really drastic changes. People get tunnel vision, they lose fine motor skills, auditory occlusion occurs, and other things. She may not have even visually cued in on the difference in the weight of her firearm or the lack of yellow colors present on Tasers.
On top of these, once the young man stopped complying incidents like these sort of turn into a frenzy to complete the arrest (one thing a lot of people do not realize is that when it comes to resisting arrest it is not only unlawful to resist a lawful arrest, but also unlawful to resist an unlawful arrest - bizarre, eh?).
Policing is so resistant to change. Take police car chases. Early on I was in a few, and goddamn, they are the most exciting and thrilling things to do. But then it all changed for me because I saw a police officer on television describing how he lost his entire family in a police chase involving driving offenses - his wife and children were T-boned by a fleeing driving offender. It was at that point the entire "cost-benefit analysis" hit me. But try to explain this to cops and not only do they scream how they are being handcuffed from doing their jobs, but then run through the whole list of idiotic excuses - he could be a murderer, he could have just murdered someone, he may murder someone and so on - rather than taking in all the things that are most common in police chases and their endings.
What I'm trying to suggest is that the police need to weigh all of this to determine if their actions are worth the end result. It's like Kevin G added, they knew this guy - for a minor warrant let him drive off and catch him another day and add the additional charges.
Hope all of this answers questions.
