The only other people were other press. There were camera and microphone operators. Looking at the video, it’s so obvious that the cop aimed at the press and then shot.

Is there any way to tell what kind of cop that was?

Ok.

So, when people throw around the phrase ‘rubber bullet’… it tends to conjure in most people’s minds… a projectile, made of rubber, that is about the same size as a bullet.

They are not the same size as a bullet.

They are the same size as a grenade launcher round, between 30mm and 40mm, generally speaking… which is about 3x to 5x the size of most actual bullets from a pistol or rifle, albeit not travelling as fast as either of those.

They also tend to have a metal inner core.

So its more like a slug round from an 8 to 4 gauge shotgun, with rubber coating, were you to roughly extrapolate existing shotgun gauge size/naming conventions:

Also, the actual usage manuals for these things state that… you are not to fire them directly at someone closer than approximately 200-400 feet, what you are supposed to do is fire them at the ground at a shallow angle, such that they bounce or ricochet upward at a shallow angle…

… because there is so much energy in one of these rounds that they need to be dissapated by that bounce, otherwise they are quite likely to cause serious injury or even kill someone.

That is to say, ‘less than lethal’ means ‘potentially lethal’ when used improperly, and cops routinely use them improperly all the time.

This cop who fired that round, at that range (under 200 feet, under the minimum safe distance for any kind of firing)… not only was he too close to safely fire the thing at all, it looks like he just fired it directly at her, between her knees and hip, without a bounce.

When cops say, when people say cops ‘need better training’, the technical details I have just outlined are part of that better training… which, in practice, they disregard all the time.

Similar wild deviations exist between manufacturer suggested usage guidelines for tasers, and how they are routinely, actually used by cops.

Another example of intentional bullshit perversion of proper use procedures is the cop ‘at ease’ stance, where elbows are bent and each hand is roughly up at each pectoral… this is a common, general ‘idle’ stance… and it often is used to obscure the view of chest mounted body cams.

In conclusion: Yes, this absolutely was an intentional attempt to murder or grievously injure a journalist, basically 2nd degree attempted murder if this was done by not-a-cop.