I’m not able to get it to go slow enough to do individual frames, but it looked to me like the officer reached into the vehicle to prevent him from putting the car in gear and driving off - at one point on the video both of the officer’s hands were in the picture frame, so it is apparent he didn’t have his weapon out all the time.
We don’t know when or why the officer drew his weapon.
The makeup of the human brain is extraordinary, we are capable of reacting quicker than rational thought. My take is that the officer registered alarm at the thought/perception of being pulled by the car and his brain quickly cycled through available options of what to do, seizing on shoot the driver as an appropriate action. (This response is accurately and artfully described by Sebastian Junger in his book WAR. I’ve include the excerpt at the end of this post so as not to detract.)
The missing piece for me is the quick weapon presentation, why did he have the weapon out, or did he merely have his hand on the holster and present it that fast?
In any event, from my perspective he is over-charged, he is responsible for his actions, but I would not be surprised if after expert testimony the charges drop to the Ohio crime which involves negligent death by accident.
Read Junger:
"Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there is no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with the bullets. The amygdala can process an auditory signal in fifteen milliseconds - about the time it takes a bullet to go 30 feet. The amygdala is fast but very limited; all it can do is trigger a reflex and wait for the conscious mind to catch up. That reaction is called a startle, and it is composed of protective moves that would be a good idea in almost any situation. When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does the exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a “fear grimace”: the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down. Make that expression in front of a mirror and see not only how instantly recognizable it is, but also how it seems to actually produce a sense of fear. It’s as if the neural pathways flow in both directions, so the expression triggers fear as well as being triggered by it.
The videotape I shot during the ambush in Alibad shows every man dropping into a crouch at the distant popping sound. They don’t do this in response to a loud sound - which presumably is what evolution has taught us - but in response to the quieter snap of bullets going past. The amygdala requires only a single negative experience to decide that something is a threat, and after one firefight every man in the platoon would have learned to react to the snap of the bullets and to ignore the much louder sound of men near them returning fire. In Alibad the men crouched for a second or two and then straightened up and began shouting and taking cover. In the moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up: pulse and blood pressure to heart attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine level through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and the major muscle groups."
Unfortunately in this case, the officer’s action, triggered by the amygdala, caused him to react before cognitive thought.
JM .02