That is not the quote. What he says is, "
And he would have been a nice witness as I executed you because you're stupid." I did not take it to mean he could shoot someone for failure to inform, but rather that the officer is trying to convince himself that (a) he saw a bulge and (b) he knew the bulge was a gun and thus if he had shot the guy, it would have been justified and over before the partner could have done anything more than watched.
What I see here is an officer who realizes he created a problem (instructing the driver not to move and not to speak for five minutes) and is now suffering from cognitive dissonance. Unable to admit to himself that he caused the conflict, he instead begins to remember things happening in a different way than we saw on the dashcam. He's blaming the driver when he himself is the one who bullied the driver into staying quiet when the driver made repeated attempts to inform.
The other thing I see, of course, is a violation of the so-called "Rule of Stupid" by the driver:
- Don't do stupid things,
- Don't hang around with stupid people, and
- Don't go to stupid places.
My guess is that if our friendly neighborhood ex-taxi driver
hadn't been in what is presumably a known prostitution area, with a prostitute
and her pimp, he probably would not have experienced any interaction with law enforcement officers that evening. Hanging out with people engaged in criminal activity paints you into a corner and it is unreasonable to expect a LEO to roll up and assume you're just a nice guy doing a favor for a pretty girl...