Okay. So there were 130+ bullets fired. Why so many bullets? The answer is mix of shock, fear, and bad accuracy.
It's not the best answer but there are a lot of cops out there who are not at the SWAT level of shooting skill. Once you get out of police academy, your practice time at the range goes down, and so does your accuracy. Non-SWAT cops have an annual shooting test but that's relatively easy to pass. Range/practice time is not mandatory. SWAT people practice shooting regularly. SWAT cops have a more stringent passing score. I went monthly but most cops didn't. So to get back to the issue, there are a lot of cops who don't practice and because of that, their accuracy goes down. At this incident, the cops were probably firing out of fear and the first couple rounds coming out of their barrels were not on target, so they fire more. There were 13 cops who shot at the couple. That's about 10 each. My guess is they just unloaded in the car's direction. Pretty bad decision on every one's part. I'm not defending them. That's not good for multiple reasons. One being ammo management. Unlike video games, you can run out of ammo.
Anyway, this isn't the only case where cops shoot off a ton of rounds. It's mostly related to not practicing at the range. If you practice, then you are more likely to not get in trouble when it comes to following department guidelines, but also less likely to run out of ammo in a drawn out firefight, which is a worst case scenario.
IA investigated and discovered that there were officers who didn't follow protocol, so it's not like there was a cover up.
