A few days back I cautioned against jumping to conclusions about the man shot by police shortly before his wedding in New York. At the time, Mayor Bloomberg even said publicly he thought the officers were wrong to shoot as much as they did.

A few details have come out — the NYPD seems to be investigating quite aggressively — and the additional information doesn’t add a whole lot of clarity. I’m still undecided on whether the shooting was justified.

For one, at least one of the five officers was black, so it seems unlikely the shooting was a purely racial thing (as the involvement of Al Sharpton might imply). “Not racist” is a far cry from “good police procedure against people who deserved it,” of course.

Also, and more interestingly, the police are claiming there might have been a fourth man in the car who ran away with a gun. There is no indication of actual gunshots, just that the cops “apparently feared one man in the group was about to get a gun.” Protesters are calling this the “phantom gunman,” and the three survivors have said there was no fourth.

Of course, absolutely no trust can be placed in the men’s denial. If they didn’t have a gun, this is what they’d say, and if they did have a gun, this is what they’d say.

What strikes me is how uncertain the police seem, as they’ve merely “suggested,” not “insisted” (though this could just be bad word choice by the journalist) one existed. I won’t make assumptions about situations I’ve never been in, so I will caution that it was dark and the scenario was undoubtedly chaotic. But you’d think one in five officers would remember without doubt whether one of the people he was shooting at ran away successfully — or at least that there were four people to start with, not three.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.