It is not unreasonable to ask police officers to display the same degree of courage in the face of sometimes hostile canines that we ask of every United States postal carrier. Cops unable to marshal it cannot be trusted to put the public’s safety before their own.

And it is not unreasonable to ask police departments to train cops as well as meter readers when the failure to do so predictably results in needlessly killed pets and endangered humans. But many police departments don’t care enough to go to the trouble.

The final lesson from Saturday’s Minneapolis shooting is that police officers sometimes misrepresent the circumstances that ostensibly justified their decision to shoot––and that their accounts should not be presumed accurate absent corroborating video.