Family wasn't there when she had a couple of kids and another on the way to help out and maybe prevent her death. But since there's a chance of a payday...HERE EVERYONE COMES!!

Sorry pops... this one's a straight loser. No judge or jury in the world is going to give an award to the family of a woman who proactively attacked a police officer with a deadly weapon.

Even a private citizen could have have shot and killed Lyles in this scenario and would never be found guilty criminally or civilly (at least, for manslaughter and wrongful death, respectively)

".....representing Charleena Lyles estate...."

Yeah right. Like Charleena Lyles had an "estate"
LMAO!

@3: Review the definitions of estate in your favorite dictionary.

Look at all the scumbags in here defending cowardly murdering thugs who shot a mentally ill pregnant woman in the back.

That feel good? You feel tough?

@5: How do you feel?

@5. They can't possibly feel anything but aweful you jackass. They shot a mentally ill pregnant woman who was coming at them with a butcher knife and she died. Did you see the police celebrating this? Or winking at each other about getting away with murder? That's right, you only imagined that part. If you think they did it because they get their jollies killing people then you have no mature grasp on reality or why a person would put up with the stress and shit pay to do a thankless job like policing and should kindly stay silent while grown ups are talking.

@7: posters @1-3 didn't shoot Lyles. read better.

@8: That subject/verb agreement does not negate his point. Be better.

How it looks to me is, @5 was talking to @1-3, and @7 thought @5 was talking to the police, and responded accordingly. Not sure where @8 got the idea that @7's "the officers must feel terrible" is relevant to the conversation.

Meanwhile, @2 has a (sad) point. @1 and @3 are just assholes.

Sorry, meant @9 instead of @8

@10 nailed it. Misread the comment and replied as though 5 was addressing the police. In all fairness the response applies to the sentiments a section of slog commenters portray regularly. That the police are murderous thugs. Which sometimes may be true. But by and large is unequivocally false and proven false with a minimum of effort, insight, and something the accusers usually pride themselves on, empathy.

I suppose its an "organic" fear of police, coupled with an "organic" contempt for authority, that gets extrapolated by some into generalizing our public servants whom protect us as murderous thugs.

@12: not murderous thugs, but nervous, jumpy, & trigger-happy government employees. killing lyles was incompetence more than anything - no taser, no nightstick, no option to back away, just poor procedures and guns.

we're not all omari tahir-garrett. i'm not hyperbolic in my condemnation of police killings. i just want it to stop.

Let's concentrate on what's important here. The feelings of two cowardly cops who murdered a pregnant woman by shooting her in the back.

Let's not fixate on justice. Or why the jackboot apologists in here don't seem to care that maybe there could be other ways to handle this shit other than immediately resorting to shooting a mentally ill pregnant woman in the back.

No. Let's stay focused on the feelings of the poor cops who will retain their jobs to murder more mentally ill pregnant women.

Because that's the real issue. Hurt feelings of murderers.

@15. I feel immense sadness when I think about Lyles kids. I grew up with an extremely abusive paranoid Vietnam vet of a father so I know what it's like to have an unstable parent. And then to have your mother killed right in front of you by the police? It's tragic at the least, traumatic without a doubt, and probably scarring for the rest of their lives. That's where my heart is broken. And as a human being, I extend the same presumption of decency to other humans. That's why I said of course the police officers feel bad. Unless they are sociopaths (which I'm sure ideological idiots like you assume) they can't help but feel horrible about what they did even if it was a life and death situation.

And @14. Until we have emotionless, indestructible robots policing us i think we are going to have to tolerate some human error in confrontational outcomes (not saying Lyles was an error although the outcome is tragic). There's certainly not a lot of outcry for citizens to act in an irreproachable, procedurally professional manner every time they come in contact with the police. Why? Because they are humans, fallible and not always at their best in a high stress, police just showed up, situation.

We can demand professionalism and decency from our police, but we can't expect perfection.

@12: The sheer fact you say "trigger-happy" means that you don't know what you are talking about. Given the ramifications of internal review, having to take a desk job, the emotional stress on the cop and his/her family, the public glare, not to mention the psychological torment from taking another life is hardly conducive to being trigger happy.

The import lesson here is that we shouldn't do anything to prevent this from happening in the future.

@16: I accept that there will be errors. but this is a (national, long-running) pattern, and to demand changes that result in fewer police shootings is reasonable.

@17: I said trigger-happy, not @10. read better.

these cops aren't thinking about the ramifications to their jobs when they shoot black people to death, otherwise they wouldn't. they're scared. exhibit a: tamir rice.

@18, very true. Where were those kids in her custody in the first place if she was mentally unstable?

@20: Police are trained to handle their fear in armed confrontations; those that can't fail to make it out of the academy.

@22 Hi. Brother of two LEO's and spent over 20 years training with police officers. Is the job exceedingly difficult? Yes. Are they expected to be simultaneous warriors, substance abuse treatment therapists? Yes. Are they on the front line of every social disorder? Yes.

And that's the problem. Out bar for what it takes to be a cop does not meet the training nor the expectations of actual being a cop.

And therefore you have no fucking clue, as usual, as to what you're talking about.

Bad cops make it out of the "academy" all the time. But they are not the real issue.

You realize not every LEO went to a police academy, right? And you know that most "academy's" last less than a year? And. You don't even need a JD bachelors degree.

No. Of course you don't.

Look. The problem is systemic. No other wealth developed western democracy has the problems with police shootings that we have. We have created this ideology for law enforcement in this country where cops are lethal "warriors" with the power over life and death. And thus we attract a significant portion (not a majority, but that doesn't matter) of unstable, violent goons to our police force. Not to mention the racial components reflected by them from our racist institutions in general.

That is the problem. As long as entire policing communities don't face serious consequences - and police unions guarantee that they do not - for using lethal force, they will continue this decline into a goon squad.

Other countries have solved this. We could, too.

All this apologia for two cops that shot a mentally ill pregnant woman in the god damned back is disgusting. Armed or not, other police forces are trained in non-lethe ways to deal with these situations. And police that fuck up are put in god damned jail.

@21 might have something to do with underfunded government services. What is the caseload for a person with child protective services? What is the maximum caseload a person could be expected to handle with any degree of competence? But lets just keep doing things the way we've always done them I'm sure all the "hopes and prayers" will solve these problems and we wont have to do anything.

@23: I appreciate your insights. But given the facts of the case, and your experiences, it's baffling that you would write such a stereotypical sentence as the first sentence of your last paragraph. Seems myopic and generalizing. And that saddens me, given your closeness to the profession.

Oh, even if I didn't know what I was talking about, it doesn't necessarily mean that what I write isn't true.