This article is posted by a website called Blue Lives Matter, so you can already guess which political angle they are coming from and take several grains of salt with it, but they claim that California’s new law will hold police officers to an unreasonable standard - namely, that police officers will not be allowed to open fire on a suspect who points an unloaded or malfunctioning gun at them, even if the cops could not possibly have known that the gun was an unloaded or malfunctioning one.
Setting aside the debate over BLM and politics - GQ forum - is this actually true? That if the law passes, cops who open fire on suspects will be held accountable due to later facts unveiled during investigation that they could not have possibly been aware of at the time, such as the fact that a suspect’s firearm actually didn’t contain bullets?
The article, if you can call it that, fails to make any reference to the “proposed law”, or as they are called in legislative parlance, a “bill”. So it is impossible to give any qualified answer to this question other than a hypothetical law that would penalize a police officer for not being able to X-ray vision a pistol to see that the magazine is empty would be challenged and invalided by the widely applied “reasonable person” test.
One would think “reasonable” and “necessary” would be one and the same, or at least sufficiently close to not require legislative distinction, but regardless, just passing a law to make minor semantic distinctions isn’t going to prevent anyone from being shot by overenthusiastic police. What is needed is better training in conflict de-escalation and the use of non-lethal force methods to subdue a suspect who isn’t presenting an imminent threat to officers or bystanders.
Pointless bill, manufactured outrage. Score is 0-0.
Interesting that the author of the article cited in the OP never once quoted a bill, or linked to one. I wonder if he might just possibly be making shit up?
The proposed bill is cited all over the place; e.g., the Sacramento Bee’s blurb about the proposed legislation.
A search of proposed bills in the CA Legislature using the keyword phrase, “necessary force,” doesn’t turn anything up though, and none of the bills with either Rep. Weber or McCarty as the authors look like they’re the one we’re after.
So, I’m going with trial balloon and press release, but not an actual bill.
I like the sentiment, but Whoa Nelly, is God going to be in the details for something like this.
Yes lots of media articles, not particularly conservative or police oriented ones, say Weber and McCarty will propose such a bill. Many of the articles say it’s Bill 931 but the search site you gave says that’s another unrelated bill by McCarty.
Anyway I don’t see anything practically more ‘hypothetical’ about a bill legislators say they’ll introduce than one than they already have. Sure, any bill that hasn’t actually passed the necessary house(s) of a legislature and likely to be signed by an executive is much more hypothetical than one that has, and it’s a high ratio of bills in the first v. second category in every state and nationally.
On the original article, obviously it is assuming its own take on the difference between ‘necessary’ and ‘reasonable’ force which is not spelled out in the statements of the legislators relayed by media, and arguably not a plausible take on it. It’s saying the change would be from what appeared reasonable to the police officer at the time to what was later found to be necessary. As for example the gun aimed at the police is found to be empty, so in fact it wasn’t necessary to shoot that person rather than just grab it from him. But while it might be easy to reject that characterization, what else does the change actually mean? The lack of a well explained difference in the two standards, with examples given, does tend to leave it open to any interpretation, albeit the ‘PLM’ site one is extreme. But it’s not as if ambitious lawyers never take extreme positions on what ambiguous laws were supposed to have meant. And I think there is some limited merit in the PLM take, if you take it as hyperbole and with a big grain of salt, in pointing out that ‘necessary’ does tend to imply a comparison to known facts, whereas ‘reasonable’ tends to imply individual judgment in the absence of full facts.
Even in the UK, with what many Americans see as draconian gun laws, allows armed police to shoot a suspect who ‘appears’ to be armed and threatening. If the ‘weapon’ turns out to be fake, hard luck.
Sounds like a deliberate misinterpretation of the proposed law by a biased source to me.
There is nothing I can see in any reporting of the law that supports the assertion “it does not allow for the officers to use force based on how circumstances appear to them at the time. Instead, it allows the officer to be judged in hindsight”.
I can see how police officers and their representatives might have some resnoable objections to this law. But this guy is simply making stuff up as far as I can see.
Whaddaya know, the law will make it reasonable for the cop to shoot someone only if their life is obviously in danger, instead as a matter of expedience so they can dispose of the perceived criminal and get back to the donut shop. And cops are against this law. Go figure, eh?
Doesn’t really matter; American juries have proven themselves utterly incapable of bringing any civilian-killing cop to justice, no matter how unjustified the shooting was. :rolleyes:
Reasonable has an established meaning in law. It means what a reasonable person would conclude in a situation if they had the same information and experience that the person in question had.
So, no, it would not be reasonable to expect anyone to be able to tell whether a gun is loaded or unloaded by looking at it. Nor would it be reasonable for a person confronting somebody armed with a gun to conclude they were not in serious danger.
But confronting somebody and thinking “This person might have a gun even though I can’t see one. So I better shoot them just to be safe.” is not a reasonable conclusion.
From 2011 (latest numbers I could find) there is about 1 person per week killed by a screwdriver. Probably a lot more assaulted & injured, but not fatally.
Use of a large screwdriver is fairly common in muggings, by the more experienced type of mugger. If you are caught with it in your pocket, your lawyer can claim in court that you were carrying it to ‘tighten screws on your mothers’ kitchen cabinets’ or whatever – hard to make that excuse for a gun.
Yeah, seems to me assuming ‘necessary’ and ‘reasonable’ are the same, but you’d have to pass a law requiring one word instead of the other, isn’t actually any more logical than the ‘police lives matter’ site assuming ‘necessary’ means with all facts in hindsight. Neither thing would be reasonable, either changing the wording for no actual purpose, or applying a hindsight standard. So it leaves the mystery of that the intention of the proposed law actually is, in logical terms, not political sloganeering terms.
Most comments to my reading have simply reiterated the claim that police shoot people too often without reasonable justification. They haven’t illuminated a practical distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘reasonable’. At least the ‘PLM’ assumption is a clear distinction* between the two even if wouldn’t be a workable one, and even if the legislators did not say that was the distinction, or say specifically at all what the distinction is supposed to be.
*and again the one which actually is implied by common English usage of the two words. ‘It was reasonable for the police to shoot the suspect who pointed his gun at them though we now known that, tragically, it wasn’t necessary to shoot him because the gun wasn’t loaded’.