Honestly, you're getting worse and worse in this. How can you actually be saying that's these cops should have risked dying in order to possibly subdue a thief who obviously was going to fight them? How do you know what would happen if these 3 guys tried to take him down? Even if he didn't have a weapon on him, which they didn't know for sure, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN A FIGHT. He could have gotten a lucky position and broken one of their necks. Hit one of them just right to either cause death from the blow or a fall. Gotten a weapon from one of them during the encounter and endangered everyone's lives...including bystanders.
Look man, I know you're a pretty smart guy with a straight head on your shoulders, but in this particular case, in this thread, you are coming off like someone who watches and believes too many movies. You just don't give a guy like this a chance to hurt you....period. And he did nothing to deserve that chance. He broke the law, and tried to fight off and hurt police officers. Given the fact that third cop came and saw the fight going on actually proves that the first 2 cops were TRYING to keep it non-lethal (which again, was a BAD idea at that point). This guy EARNED being shot!
Now, maybe if he had been shot 41 times, we'd have something to debate...