This should surprise nobody, but you can’t kill a cop and claim self-defense. That’s a cite for Missouri, but I expect it’s pretty much the same everywhere. (That cite makes reference to this section as well.) Not that a jury would acquit you anyway.
Shodan - you point out that many unarmed blacks have been killed by police since Trayvon Martin. I don’t have any stats handy to back it up but I’m willing to bet a fair number of unarmed whites have also been killed by police. What people fail to understand is that an unarmed person may present a deadly threat to an officer and be shot as a result. Unarmed DOES NOT mean “un-dangerous”.
“How is that possible?”, you say? Say you are a lone patrolman stopping a car at 2:00 AM. The driver is a male 6’4" 280 lbs. He is non-compliant and exits his car and approaches you aggressively saying “What the fuck are are you going to do, shoot me?”. You pepper spray him but that just infuriates him and he grabs onto you and pushes you up against the your car and starts slamming you on the hood. What are the options here? If I could, I’d draw and fire until the threat had stopped. I certainly have a reasonable belief that I was in imminent danger of being killed or seriously injured. Now I’ve shot (and possibly killed) an unarmed person. You can’t possibly have a problem with that, can you?
Or you’re chasing someone down a dark alley and he reaches into his waistband, pulls out a shiny object and turns toward you. Knowing that this is consistent with the drawing of a handgun, you fire and kill the person armed with a cell phone. Another justified shooting of an unarmed person.
Both of these incidents actually happened where I worked. Both went to a grand jury because in my state the Attorney General has decided that all police killings of an unarmed person must do so. Whether its in the interest of transparency (but grand jury proceedings are secret, so how transparent is that?) or because it relieves any one person of the responsibility of clearing the cop thus deflecting public scrutiny, I don’t know.
I venture to say that the vast majority of people who are on the receiving end of police force were non-compliant in one way or another. And those on the receiving end of deadly force were not only non-compliant but also presented what the officer reasonably believed to be a
a threat of death or serious bodily injury.
To be sure, there are racist bully cops who use excessive force. History has shown that cameras will help cut down on this. I’m all for them and any cop with common sense (no jokes necessary here) will want one.
What has me really frosted with the Ferguson situation is that almost everyone - citizens, politicians, self-appointed pundits and especially the media have pretty much already decided that the cop was wrong. Some big mouth politico (a U.S. Senator? - I didn’t get her name) has said that if there is no indictment that what will follow will make the prior protests/riots look like a picnic. This wasn’t said as a matter of fact but more as a threat… WTF is that?! How about finishing the investigation? She was also demanding the prosecutor recuse himself (maybe not a bad idea).
I’m willing to consider the possibility that the cop was completely wrong but there simply hasn’t been enough evidence released to say one way or the other. How many cop-haters out there are willing to consider that the cop may have been right?
Its been said that a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich. In my experience, that’s pretty much true. It is rare that a prosecutor doesn’t get an indictment when he is seeking one. It is a one-sided proceeding and all an indictment means is that the grand jury found enough evidence for the case to proceed to trial. They can also present evidence in such a way that a no-bill is virtually assured. What we may see here is an indictment (regardless of the strength of the evidence) to calm the masses and a trial in which the officer is acquitted. I don’t think the prosecutor will have the balls to not indict, even if the likelihood of a conviction at trial is remote.
“No justice, no peace” seems to me to really mean “No conviction, no peace.” We shall see.
I assume you mean Marley23.
Regards,
Shodan
While I agree it’s unlikely a jury would acquit, neither of your cites do not necessarily negate an argument self defense in the case of a law enforcement officer. Nowhere does it say a person’s right to self defense doesn’t apply if the aggressor is a police officer. 563-046 gives a police officer more latitude in committing violence to affect an arrest than would be given to someone who is not a police officer, but it stops way, way short of allowing a police officer to do anything. It certainly would not allow a cop to walk up to someone and threaten to kill them with an automatic rifle for no discernible reason.
Sorry, Shodan. You are correct.
Shodan, Marley23… same difference, really. 
I think you’re right, actually. I thought (b) meant ‘A person may use physical force upon another person to defend himself unless the aggressor is a law enforcement officer,’ but I think it means that subsection doesn’t apply to law enforcement because they’re allowed to be the aggressors.
My local ABC station did a report on the military weapons given to Arkansas Police.
Grenade launchers? A town with 2500 people gets 3 assault rifles? Bryant a medium sized town got 20 M16’s in 2013. :eek:
Pardon my French, but this is just fucked up. Even the Ordnungspolizei in WWII didn’t have military weapons like this. We still live in America? The land of the free and the home of the brave?
Smoke grenades, tear gas, flash-bangs, perhaps.
That is totally unfair and biased. He made a valid point in the Great Debates section. And yes he challenged the basic assumptions built into the question. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Terrible moderating.
[QUOTE=MikeF]
RickJay - you are correct. No one is forced to become a cop. If it is viewed as simply too dangerous then one can seek other employment. That said, when you task someone with doing a job you may want to let them them decide which tools are best suited for the work, particularly when it comes their safety. Are you going to hire a iron worker and then tell him you don’t like he harness he is using?
[/QUOTE]
No, but I also know I’m sure as hell not going to trust any structural steel or erection company that trusts its ironworkers to decide what harness to use. No legitimate outfit would do that, because ironworkers (mot workers, actually) are routinely careless about their safety and that of others unless they are constantly badgered and told what to do. Trust me, I know.
Well, Jesus, of COURSE it matters how commonly they’re used, Mike. It would be positively insane to prepare police officers for a threat that has a near-to-zero likelihood of happening. It is not entirely unknown - it’s rare, but it’s happened - for criminals to employ helicopters to pull of heists and jailbreaks. Should we outfit squad cars with Stingers? There was that guy who stole a tank in San Diego, I believe it was, and went on a rampage until the tank got stuck and a cop shot him through the turret hatch. Since there is a nonzero chance a lunatic could steal a tank and go on a spree, should police now patrol on Humvees armed with TOW launchers?
There’s a cost-to-benefit ratio for everything. “At any cost” is a nonsensical concept that nobody really believes. Even your examples are mostly terrible, since in most of those cases the shooter was not subdued by a patrol officer with a rifle and would not have been had they had them; it wouldn’t have stopped Newtown, wouldn’t have stopped Aurora, probably wouldn’t have prevented the West Memphis killings, and wouldn’t have prevented the Pittsburgh killings. In most cases where an armed suspect kills multiple police officers the suspect is lying in wait and ambushes them, as was the case in Pittsburgh, or in the recent police shootings in New Brunswick.
There is of course some upper limit as to where police officers should be armed; I am quite certain you do not support outfitting patrol cars with .50 caliber machine guns, rocket launchers, or having them call in fire missions from 155-mm howitzer groups in strategic points throughout the city. I, based on my personal experience with automatic weapons, knowing the difference between the way soldiers treat them versus the way police officers treat them, knowing what I expect of the police force that serves me and my community, and knowing damned well that when people have a shiny new hammer they tend to see everything as being a nail, believe the line should be drawn well short of automatic rifles. I am absolutely, positively 100% certain doing this would result in more dead cops and more dead civilians.
That’s how I read it. Of course, the law reads like my home insurance policy, going “This is a crime, except if A and then it’s not, except when B and then it is again, unless if C and then it’s not again.”