The Los Angeles Police Department went on city-wide tactical alert for several hours after an officer shot and killed a man in the Watts neighborhood. Responding to an attempted-suicide call in a busy park in front of a public housing project, police ordered a man known as "Chubby" to drop his knife. LAPD Lieutenant Anthony Alba stated that the man then charged the officers, at which point they shot the man with a taser dart. The man got up and charged the officers again with the knife, so police shot him.

An outraged bystander commented, "They killed that man in cold murder." A witness, Joe Jones, stated, "They shot him for nothing. He'd lunged at him with a knife. That's it." Hundreds of police officers in riot gear were called out to try and calm an angry crowd at the housing project.

[Ed.: Recall that on another occasion, the extremely intoxicated Rodney King led LAPD officers on a wild, high-speed chase through city streets, refused to submit to orders to lie down and be searched for weapons, twice charged officers, resisted two Taser charges, and threw off police who attempted to subdue him prior to the picturesque video footage of officers beating him into submission with nightsticks. Some jurisdictions allow officers to shoot perpetrators at this point.]

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