Some people may not know this. But laws regarding self defense, for police, are pretty skewed to favor the cops. I don’t need a cite, it’s pretty universal. (Ironically, this is probably partly what led to the Rodney King verdict. But that’s another story.)
I was recently watching Real Time with Bill Maher. And he brought up a good point. He said, if every shooting is found to be done “by the book”, maybe it is time to throw out that (proverbial) book. I.e., change the law. Surely the police don’t require that much protection.
Yeah, you do need a cite. How can we decide if the book needs to be thrown out without reading the book? Maybe only a few sentences in the book need to be thrown out.
I don’t know, if it’s universal or not. But that is the general opinion I seem to get from newscasters and commentators (like Bill Maher). In any even, I know it is hard to find an officer guilty for some reason. And it seems to me, that is more than just because juries are personally loathe to convict them.
(BTW, here is an interesting article, that covers this topic a little bit, at least.)
The heart of the problem isn’t the legal standard (even though things *are *slightly different for police, as in the example of the modern fleeing felon rule). It’s that we live in a society that is extremely deferential to the police. Many lawyers won’t take cases that involve a credibility dispute with a cop because juries very rarely believe that cops lie (even though there is a lot of evidencethat they lie all the time). So, unlike an ordinary criminal defendant, a cop who testifies for a grand jury or petit jury that he was in fear for his life, or the guy had the knife, or whatever, is going to be believed every time. There is also the problem that prosecutors and cops are colleagues, and it is the rare circumstance when prosecutors will zealously prosecute their colleagues.
Since we’re not fixing that stuff any time soon, better to focus on preventing the shootings in the first place. Body cameras are a good step, if properly implemented. But so is generally rolling back the idea that overzealous policing fights crime. They shouldn’t be having so many tense car stop encounters, for example, and should be doing more investigating of serious crimes. They should de-escalate situations more readily. They should receive implicit bias training. There’s lots to do on the prevention side, some of it by law and some by other means like education and training.
Police officers collect a middle-class salary. Like most people they’re going to want to live in a community that’s commensurate with their income. They’re going to resent being told that they have to live in a poor community. (And they won’t be able to afford to live in a rich community.)
Some people might say they don’t care. But they should. Capable recruits are going to look for job in middle class communities. Poor communities will be stuck with the recruits who couldn’t get jobs elsewhere. With all the problems we’re currently experiencing, does anyone think that lowering hiring standards is a good idea?
I agree with what you’re saying. There is a bias in favor of the police in the legal system. And cameras and new training are necessary.
But we should also remember that the police are not ordinary citizens. It’s part of their job to go into dangerous situations and confront dangerous people. We’re never going to achieve a situation where the police will be - or should be - treated just like everyone else.
A community should extend a higher degree of trust to its police. But a community also should expect its police to live up to that higher degree of trust.
Sure. And it’s worth noting that the “community” we’re implicitly talking about here is, by and large, African-Americans. And the trust gap between African-Americans and law enforcement has a long history (and a long present) of largely uninterrupted police mistreatment from Jim Crow through the War on Drugs. One of the best things we could do to improve trust is end the War on Drugs, which disparately harasses, arrests, and imprisons millions of young black men for committing crimes that white people engage in at roughly equal rates–and is also one of the main impetuses behind all of the vehicle stops and street encounters that lead to high tension (and shootings). We should also stop doing things like ordering cops to engage in stop-and-frisk tactics focused on black neighborhoods, for the same reasons. So, yeah, I think we should take the community trust issue seriously, and at the level of high-level criminal justice policy.
But it’s absolutely true that even in a perfect world we’re going to be asking police to go into situations that may require self-defense far more often than the average citizen, and so they need to know that having to claim self-defense isn’t going to bankrupt them or ruin their lives. I think we’re galaxies from even successfully prosecuting egregiously bad cops, so I’m not that worried about overcorrecting and making this harder for good cops. But I’m not opposed in principle to the idea that things should be different for police, for exactly the reason you lay out.
If the candidates who can afford to live in Golfopolis are 98% white, but the candidates who meet all the other criteria are only 70% white, it’s likely illegal racial discrimination to only hire from the first group. (Golfopolis could try to prove that Golfopolis residents are demonstrably better cops than non-residents, but that’s going to be a tough hill to climb.)
I don’t think they’d have a tough time showing that they had valid, race-neutral reasons for wanting their officers to be residents of the community. Doesn’t mean it would be a wise policy, but I think a Title VII claim would probably fail. (In any event, that would be a statutory problem, not a constitutional one, so it is presumably included the various changes of law under discussion.)
I don’t think it’s the law that needs changing: I think it’s police culture.
In one of the videos I remember seeing, an officer shoots a man 8 times in the back. He then goes and picks up something off the ground, and drops it near the victim (his tazer, if I remember right). Another officer walks up, and completely ignores what he’s doing. I think this happened in Baltimore.
I’m not a Maryland lawyer, but I don’t think any state law authorizes shooting someone merely for running away. Moving the tazer, I’m guessing, was part of a plan to cover up what really happened. In other words, it was lying and covering up for each other that was the problem, not the law. Nothing about what actually happened was legal.
No, it was N. Charleston SC, Baltimore was the guy who had his neck broken for no good reason. That is from a very long thread discussing poor police behavior, which mostly does not discuss how we should fix the problem.
I think you’re focusing too much on race in what’s not really a racial situation.
In the town of Golfopolis, house prices start at around $500,000 and quickly rise past seven figures. A newly hired police officer is making $20,000 a year. It doesn’t matter whether he’s black or white - he’s not going to be able to afford to live in the community where he works.
The people who live in Golfopolis - both black and white - are doctors, lawyers, and business executives. None of them is going to be seeking to change careers and join the police department. And even if they were, they’d have to give up their current high salary and wouldn’t be able to afford to continue living in Golfopolis. Some of the children growing up in Golfopolis might be willing to join the police department - but not if it means they have to live with their parents.
The solution is for Golfopolis to hire its police - maybe even pay them more than the average salary - and then let them live outside of Golfopolis. Most of them would then buy a home in nearby Middletown, where house prices are significantly lower.
I don’t see how this is a problem. When I was working, I often lived in a different town than the town I worked in. I think a lot of people do.
And maybe Golfopolis is part of the problem. One way to reduce police violence might be to reduce crime by addressing its causes rather than just try to deal with the effects.
I’m not sure how towns like Golfopolis are causing crime. Unless you’re proposing some political and economic changes that verge on the revolutionary level, in which case we’ve moved beyond the topic of reforming police departments.
I do agree that anti-drug laws should be looked at. They seem to me to cause more problems than they solve. If it was up to me, I’d decriminalize everything - at least for adult usage. Drug users would still have to deal with their addictions but they wouldn’t have to face the additional burdens of living outside the law.
I’d also suggest repealing RICO type confiscation laws, or at least putting a lot more oversight on them. I’d work on demilitarizing police departments. And while I don’t think requiring police to live in the community they work in is a workable idea, I do feel there should be more community control over local police departments.
How many times was big Rod shot? Oh, wait. None. You’re bringing up several topics/scenarios at once and want a universal answer.
There are about 1 million peace officers (give or take) policing 320 million citizens and there have been a handful of questionable shootings. And most of those shootings have been found to be justified.
I think you need to grow up and move out of your parents basement. If you’re so worried about innocent people getting shot, why don’t you take your case to the inner-cities of America and ask them to not shoot each other? Most of those shootings are usually not justified!!!
