The glock in your example weighs
50% more than the tazer you cite.
50% more....
How could you hold that and mistake it for the feel of holding a 50% heavier glock with a different grip shape and balance? Trained professionals are intimately familiar with their gear, there is no way a trained professional could mistake grabbing a tazer for a fully loaded glock, not even in the pitch dark. What's more, your finger should NEVER be on the trigger until the moment you're ready to fire. EVER. Why was his finger on the trigger? A trigger that is shaped very differently than the safe-action trigger on the Glock series pistols, which are in fact entirely distinctive in feel, and INSTANTLY recognizable as being a glock?
This may come as a surprise to you, but i could field strip and reassamble an M-16A2 rifle blindfolded in mere seconds when i was in the infantry.
You could have handed me literally any other weapon on earth -any- and i would have known it was not an M-16A2. Instantly. Just like
any infantryman could. While blindfolded.
An A-1 didn't have the finger groove on the grip, and was a good deal lighter, and a CAR-15A2, while it has the finger groove it is, again, much lighter. Any other rifle type would be instantly recognizable as not being an M-16. Likewise, a .308 AR with the an A2 finger groove grip would be immediately noticeable because of the difference in weight.
Now i own a S&W 3rd gen double stack 9mm semi auto pistol. You could hand me any other pistol on earth (glock, sig, HK, even a single stack 3rd gen S&W, or an earlier gen double stack S&W auto), and i would know instantly that it was not a 9mm Smith & Wesson 3rd generation double stack auto. I can disassemble and reassemble it with total confidence even blindfolded. If you gave me a tazer i would instantly know that it's not my pistol. Instantly.
Professionals are intimately familiar with their gear.
What's more, a sidearm is mandated by law to be stowed in a triple retention holster.
AFAIK that's not the case for the tazer. And they are not carried in the same place on the body anyway.
For an officer to totally forget what weapon was where on his person and mis-draw a firearm instead of a tazer is an absolutely stinging rebuke of BART's entire training program, and the outright competence of the people it's putting in uniform. Let alone to then accidentally discharge said weapon into a restrained, secured, non-resisting subject laying face down on the ground. It is so totally incomprehensible that a cops training could fail so badly that i outright reject the notion out of hand.
Seriously competent, how is there any way to paint this as anything other than the worst possible police incompetence and/or mis-use of power imaginable? How can you see that as a citizen and not be enraged, knowing that any innocent bystander passing by could have been hit instead....or YOU or your kid could have been mistakenly hit, or even mistakenly caught up in the whole mess to begin with, which also happens sometimes too.
PS: This is another clear example of why all police firearms should have
manual safeties.