What, you need me to post every single incident that’s ever happened? Three is sufficient, and they’re hardly anecdotes.
So that Florida Deputy that did nothing while children were getting gunned down is a hero rather than a coward complicit in their murders?
They are. But you see- *you usually have a motive. *Police officers have no motive in a police shooting- they want to protect themselves and the public. Yes, a error of judgement can be made- and is made too often. But they dont go out thinking “Today I will find and shoot Robby.”
We have a police shortage.
Of course not. That was certainly a situation in which deadly force would have been justified. But there are far too many cases in which it is not, like the unarmed woman who was shot and killed for startling a police officer – after calling 911 to report a possible assault; or the 12-year old boy holding a toy gun who was shot and killed by police within seconds of arriving on the scene; or the unarmed man executed by police at close range with an AR-15 while obeying their orders and begging for his life. :mad:
It’s telling that even in defending the police, you prioritize the police wanting to protect themselves before protecting the public. :rolleyes:
And you’re wrong. Police do often have a motive. They were disrespected. Or someone didn’t follow their contradictory and/or unheard and/or unintelligible screamed commands quickly enough. Or they were startled, or fearful that someone was going to hurt them first. And since in nearly all cases, police officers are not punished for killing an unarmed civilian, they have little reason for restraint. After all, all they have to do is to recite the magic phrase, “I was in fear for my life,” whether that is true or not, and even if true, whether that fear is justified or not…and they get off scot-free. :rolleyes:
Actually there aren’t. You are cherry picking a few cases out of the overwhelmingly majority police shootings over the decades that are deemed justified by prosecutors and outside agencies that investigate. And those shootings themselves are a rarity among the millions of public contacts law enforcement officers make every year. A police involved shooting is a very rare occurrence.
An officer can’t protect anyone if he/she themselves get gunned down.
Can you please tell us what your training and experience is in law enforcement, rules of engagement, public safety dynamics, self defense laws and policies & procedures regarding lethal force applications before you continue to impress us with your expertise in the way things ought to be? I am fascinated by your grasp of reality of how more dead cops equal a safer populace.
First off, the “prosecutors and outside agencies that investigate” police are inherently biased in favor of the police, so their finding that a given shooting was supposedly justified doesn’t hold much water. Even when a particularly egregious shooting is deemed unjustified and a police officer is charged, it is more likely than not that the officer will be acquitted.
Of the three police shootings I supposedly cherry-picked (actually they were just the first three that came to my mind), only one officer was actually convicted (the minority officer who shot and killed a white woman). :dubious: The officer who shot an killed the 12-year old boy was never even charged, and the officer who executed the man begging for his life was charged but acquitted.
In any event, it’s not like these are the only three shootings by police in recent years. Over 1,000 people were shot and killed by U.S. police in 2019. Police shootings are a leading cause of death for young men in the United States, especially young black men. American police shoot and kill far more people than their peers in other countries, dwarfing the rate of other industrialized countries.
I’m astonished that you would seriously argue that there aren’t too many police shootings in America today.
There are over 44,000 flights serving 2.7 million airline passengers every day in the U.S. That’s over 16,000,000 flights in the U.S. every year. In the last 20 years, just four (4) of these millions of U.S. flights were hijacked. Those four flights were an infinitesimally small percentage of the flights that weren’t hijacked – no one could argue they weren’t a very rare occurrence (four hijackings out of millions and millions of flights). Yet we completely revamped security procedures, created a new federal agency, and invaded a country in response. Rare or not, we as a country decided that four hijackings out of millions of flights was not acceptable.
Over the last 50 years or so, we also decided that the number of automobile fatalities were unacceptable. Fatalities per capita have decreased steadily since the last peak around 1970, mainly because of the billions of dollars we have spent building safer cars, with airbags and other safety features now required, along with mandatory seat belt usage.
It’s only in the minds of police that they are convinced that they will be “gunned down” if they don’t shoot first. That’s a war zone mentality that should have no place in a supposedly civilized society.
I’m not going to get into a fallacious argument from authority with respect to dueling credentials. I know you are a police officer. Instead of simply defending police shootings, why don’t you use your expertise to address the problem and propose possible solutions?
Sure you are. :rolleyes: This is another false dichotomy. The choice is not “dead cops” vs. “safer populace.” If police weren’t so quick to shoot people, they might counter-intuitively actually increase their own personal safety. It’s not necessarily in their own best interest to so frequently escalate interactions with the public to the use of deadly force, and it would surely reduce tensions in the community. The populace would also surely be safer if the police would stop shooting them.
The bottom line is that policing is broken in this country. As I noted above, I fear and distrust the police today, and I’m a middle-aged white male. Is that really the kind of country we want want to live in?
If you had read Argument_from_authority you would have learned that a expert in the field under discussion is a exception. If we are talking Physics, you can use Einstein as your authority and it’s not a fallacy. So, pkbites is a expert, and thus no fallacy.
On the contrary, it doesn’t appear that you actually read the linked article:
The closest the article comes to mentioning a possible exception to the fallacy is if all parties to the argument agree that the authority in question is an expert (like Einstein in the case of physics), but even this is fraught. Too many supposed experts have been proven wrong throughout the history of science.
I don’t doubt that pkbites, as a police officer, is knowledgeable about policing. But with respect to the subject matter under discussion (the problem of excessive use of deadly force by police), I don’t agree that his being a police officer necessarily makes him an expert, to the point that the discussion is over solely because of his credentials. Indeed, one might argue that, being a police officer, he is so close to the issue as to be unable to step back and see the problem with unbiased eyes. For example, I would be surprised if his training has included a detailed comparison of the use of deadly force in the U.S. versus that of other countries – especially since his knee-jerk response to any suggestion that police in the U.S. should limit their use of deadly force will surely result in “dead cops.”
This being Great Debates, it would be nice to actually debate the issue. Instead, in his last post, pkbites attempted to short-circuit the debate by mockingly questioning my credentials.
The problem is that cops are deliberately selected to be stupid and aggressive.
It’s not a bug it’s a feature.
Cite?
I’ve served on hiring committees for several different large metropolitan departments. Candidates who tested on the advanced psych tests as highly aggressive as opposed to assertive are routinely rejected even if they passed every other test and assessment. My cite is my own experience. What is yours, please?
Would those of you who insist an officer not fire at an obvious lethal threat until actually fired at hold regular citizens to the same standard? An articulated fear of imminent death is a justifiable reason to apply lethal force regardless of who you are. Grand juries are comprised of common citizens and yet they routinely decline to indite officers or anyone else who use force to defend themselves and/or others. Where is their bias?
Yes. Indeed, I would argue this is already the case for regular citizens. If I shoot and kill another person, you can be sure that I will be arrested, prosecuted, and likely convicted. The presumption will be that the shooting was not justified, even if I insist I was in fear for my life.
Not to mention the fact that police define an “obvious lethal threat” so broadly as to render it meaningless. That same deference is not granted to regular citizens. A police officer can kill a 12-year old kid playing with a toy gun and not even be charged. Were I to do the same, there is not a doubt in my mind that I would be arrested, prosecuted, and convicted.
The problem with this statement is that the people who investigate the application of deadly force are biased to believe a police officer, and are not inclined to believe a civilian.
Why juries have a hard time convicting cops
This is absolutely false. When I was on the Civil Grand Jury we carefully went over the selections process, and the psych eval took all those guys out. And they had to have a IQ above average.
Now, if you wanna argue that getting inured to all the bad shit, and becoming callous because of that, then yes, that is problem, and I dont think pkbites will disagree here. It happens to too many cops.
The fact that we can say “the overwhelming majority of“ in relation to shootings is the actual problem here. Other countries can’t say “we reviewed 1,000 police shootings” to determine if they were justified, because they don’t have thousands of shootings every year to analyze. In our country we have individual events where our police use more bullets than UK police fire in an entire year.
You can SAY every single bullet was justified but the fundamental problem remains.
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Where are you getting this nonsense from?
Private citizens shoot and injure or kill people every day and it’s ruled justified without a prosecution or trial.
People who kill someone claiming they feared for their life when facts show a reasonable person wouldn’t have, yes they may be prosecuted. The same standard is applied to police. The handful of exceptions you’re deluding yourself with are just that, exceptions.
And laws like castle doctrines and stand your ground laws were put in place to bolster self defense privileges and to spare the innocent of erroneous prosecutions. Your beliefs are simply not true. Every single case has to be judged by it’s own facts and not on the absurd blanket that you want to throw on.
self defense rights, not privileges.
As for the rest of your post… when a non-LEO defends himself with a gun, he is more-or-less presumed guilty by the courts until proven innocent. There’s no QI. Even if it was a good shoot, the good guy must still hire an expensive legal firm because the bad guy’s family will surly sue him in civil court.
When an LEO is involved in a shooting, he is assumed innocent, has QI, and a union to back him up.
The big difference that many are missing when comparing LEO shooting vs. other people shootings is that LEOs are charged with making arrests and running towards the danger. If there is a bank robbery in progress, I sit in my office with my gun in the drawer and listen to it on the police scanner. The police get in their cars and drive towards the bank with the duty to arrest the bank robber if they find him.
And they do this over and over and over again. The have no idea of knowing if the speeder they just pulled over just killed his wife and is driving away. Now, that’s not to say that every speeder should be treated as if a murderer, but the officer must have a sixth sense about it. Basically every interaction could be a deadly one for a police officer unlike in other professions.
That is why QI is important. If they clearly overstep their bounds, then yes, make them pay. If they made a bad guess in a grey area, then don’t.
Being a criminal defense attorney, you would think I would be anti-police, but in my experience, the overwhelming majority of them are pretty good guys. You see the bad apples, but I am impressed by the general honesty and the desire to do what is right of police officers.
When the bad apples get up there and testi-lie or manufacture PC, the judge and everyone knows it, and the other police officers hate it because it makes them look bad. This “blue wall” stuff is not widespread and represents the vast minority of police.
Cite?
While I agree that there is a natural right to self defense, I live in the real world unlike quite a few others on these boards.
And I can only base my posts on the laws of the state I am charged with enforcing. My state, unfortunately, classifies self defense as a privilege, not a right.
Wisconsin 939.48. YMMV depending on location.
Does that include police officers illegally detaining me?
That’s why Baltimore police officers immediately turned on their corrupt counterparts, instead of it taking FBI involvement and almost 15 years for the rot to be exposed.
The glaring problem with your absolutist position, one that is completely unsubstantiated as well I might add, is that it is easily disproven by even one contradictory example. And there are countless instances of people claiming to have shot someone in self-defense and not being arrested or prosecuted. And even if prosecuted there are many more examples of persons successfully asserting self-defense in a pre-trial motion or acquitted after trial.
Unsurprisingly, it kinda seems to correlate to the particular fact pattern of the shooting. Sometimes the facts are obvious or largely undisputed and if the shooting is determined by the prosecutor to be legally justified under those facts then no arrest or prosecution typically occurs. And sometimes the facts are not obvious or are disputed, or the application of the law is disputed, and we use courts to determine what the facts are and how the law applies to those facts. Since there is a practically infinite number of fact patterns that can involve self-defense, that kind of flexibility regarding procedure and even outcome seems like a real good idea, i.e. a feature, not a bug. So, no, your argument that a “regular citizen” is “sure” to be “arrested, prosecuted, and likely convicted” for claiming self-defense in a shooting, regardless of the particular facts, is not only completely wrong, it’s wrong to the point of ridiculous hyperbole.
And what exactly is the source of this certitude? Facts? Statistics? Did this actually happen to you and a cop under the exact same fact pattern and they were acquitted and you were convicted? None of those? Just a general good, “certain” feeling?
And cops don’t determine for themselves what constitutes a “lethal threat” or a generally justified shooting. Ultimately the courts do that. And given the practically infinite variation for fact patterns I mentioned earlier, a court could rationally find a situation where a reasonable person, cop or not, could mistake a toy for a lethal threat and react with lethal force and find it justified, even if the threat never actually existed. Conversely, under different facts both could be convicted. Or either of the two could be convicted and the other exonerated. See the particular facts are really important and that kind of variation doesn’t lend itself to the sweeping generalizations you keep attempting to make.
Of course it is possible, in some situations, for a LEO to be treated differently than a regular citizen under the law. That’s kind of the point in those situations. That’s why we have a professional police force (a fairly recent invention) and otherwise we might as well go back to the “hue and cry” and posses.
Well, none of your “cites” seem to say what you seem to think they say (the first two), or are just worthless as a cite (the third). First of all, why are you linking to newspaper articles (and worse, an opinion piece) as some kind of cite when there are actual academic cites on these kinds of topics? Second, while the first two articles ask the question of why juries acquit cops they in no way answer the question like you seem to think they do, let alone in a manner which supports the extreme positions you have taken.
They do quote academics and other experts but they simply acknowledge that jurors, as human beings, have biases, including towards police. Shocking. But unfortunately for you they acknowledge that such biases can be for or against police and never identify the relative strengths and measurable effects of such biases. Once again, this is where actual academic cites would be useful instead of short quotes in a newspaper.
But it gets better. They also acknowledge that jurors may acquit based on evidence not available to the public or because the law simply does not allow for a conviction. In other words, sometimes juries acquit because it’s what the law and evidence demands. What the first two articles don’t ever do, not even close, is establish that juror biases in favor of police have resulted in a statistically significant number of cases where police were objectively, wrongly acquitted.
Your last cite is an opinion piece written by an ostensible First Amendment attorney on a topic that has nothing whatsoever to do with the First Amendment, lacks any kind of cited facts, and is pretty much worthless.
Lastly, while I think GreenHell was the first to suggest the police only be allowed to return fire in this thread, you agreed so I’m just going to address that here. This idea has been espoused before on this board and I’ve encountered it elsewhere and it’s a mind-bogglingly stupid idea that makes you wonder if proponents put the least amount of thought into considering the implications. I think others were getting towards this point but I didn’t see it made explicitly.
See, the goal of police is to prevent other people from putting bullets into the air where they might kill or injure someone. This is because bullets don’t just vanish if they miss their target. So even if you believe police should be subject to accepting being fired upon before engaging then what happens when one of those bullets fired at police keeps going and kills someone on the street far behind the police? Or goes through a wall or window and kills someone in their home? Is this rather obvious and substantial flaw with your idea a little more apparent now?