I don't know enough about the Walmart case to have an opinion
While, from the little I know, it is another tragic case similar to the 12 year old, from what I have been told by moondog, who was attempting to shore up the racist cop narrative, the officers might even be less culpable. According to moondog, Crawford, the victim, was on the phone with someone when he was shot, and according to the other part, his last words were "It's not real." In other words, it seems very likely that he argued with the cops who were telling him to drop the gun. What's more, while that model was indeed sold in the store, he was carrying it out of the packaging. If it was one of those guns that resemble the real thing as closely as possible, the question of how you can be expected to tell at a distance that it was the same make and model sold in the store is a good one. Who is going to get close enough to a man wandering through Walmart with a gun, to be sure it is plastic or a pellet-shooting replica, rather than the real thing? And if indeed his last words were "It's not real" it seems very likely that rather than dropping the gun, he innocently brandished it to show the cops, who had no way of knowing whether he was innocent, or trying to mislead them to buy time to raise his gun and shoot them.
The idea that Brown was not dangerous simply because he didn't have a weapon yet is so ludicrous as to make anyone who uses of questionable mental capacity and intellectual honesty.
Of the fact that he was 17. Does an assault hurt less, are you less dead, do you automatically recoup your losses, if the criminal who assaults, murders or steals from you is below the arbitrary legal line at which we place adulthood? Juvenile criminals receive lighter punishments because they are not as legally culpable for their actions. Reality does not care how old you are, so consequences are the same regardless of whether you are 17 or 70.
the video does not make clear when he said "it's not real" but it's quite obvious that he was shot within seconds of the cop seeing him in the aisle with the toy gun in his hands. then shot him again when he panicked and tried to get out of the way of the people shooting at him, only to run right back into the same cop who shot him the first time. but of course, he must have deserved to die because he's a scary black man, just like Michael Brown. i'm sure he had a retroactive criminal history that doesn't exist, just like Brown as well.
"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman