Nobody condones it when a criminal shoots an innocent person. They are arrested, tried, and imprisoned. I doubt you’re suggesting we apply the same policy to the police.
So if we give additional support to the police, we have every right to expect them to earn that support by behaving at a higher standard.
“Extend a higher degree of trust”? No, I don’t think so. That’s not helpful. Those with special authority should be judged more severely, not less, and “trust” seems foolish.
I have spoken personally to one police officer about this. He chooses to live not in the city he works on purpose. When I asked him, he said he didn’t want to police his neighbors, and it was intentional.
Which part of the article do you have an objection to, or comment about? You’re kind of all over the place with this thread. I personally think immunity is the problem but everything that Richard Parker says in post #7 sounds good too. And end the War on Drugs.
The same policy IS being applied to cops!!!
EVERY-SINGLE-POLICE-SHOOTING
goes before a district attorney and a grand jury.
Your post is a lie.
It’s a lie because it imposes a myth that somehow a police officer can kill someone and not face scrutiny for doing so, justice when it’s not justified.
The “facts” you see presented on network TV are usually NOT the totality of what a jury sees. Surely you’re not ignorant enough to not understand that!
PK, this post doesn’t break the rule it downright shatters it. You know better.
Warning issued. Calm down. Everyone.
Every shooting of an unarmed person is “questionable” in the sense that it deserves serious investigation. The number of such shootings of unarmed people, usually black men, is way more than a “handful.”
And, of course, the whole problem is that “most of those shootings have been found to be justified” even though many were not. That’s the subject of the OP.
Incorrect or at least misleading. Many such shootings are investigated by police without charges being filed or ever seeing a grand jury.
But you’re right that many questionable shootings do go before grand juries. The problem is that grand juries are controlled by prosecutors. When the prosecutor actually wants indictment they will indict. When they don’t, they won’t. There was a case in Delaware recently where a cop kicked a guy in the face, breaking his jaw, while the guy was on the ground at gunpoint and not resisting. He was brought to a grand jury by a prosecutor who didn’t want conviction, and the grand jury acquitted. After much outrage in the community, another prosecutor brought the charge to a different grand jury and got the indictment, because he actually wanted it. That’s pretty much how it goes.
That’s why the prosecutors tasked with charging cops should be an independent as possible from those cops. That’s hard to do unless you have units that solely prosecute cops, and even then, they are inevitably going to be managed by higher-ups who do have the conflict-of-interest. Which is why the likely solution here is not better prosecution of cops who commit crimes, but policies to avoid such shootings in the first place.
It’s a topic that is difficult to debate in the abstract. What specific changes would you suggest?
Do you mean that police who are charged with a crime should be convicted even if there is reasonable doubt? Or perhaps violations of department policy should be criminal offenses?
Changing the law just so we can convict more police of something does not strike me as an immediately reasonable goal. More specifics would be appropriate, IMO.
Regards,
Shodan
I’m sure every police state justifies every police shooting. The trouble is that the prosecutors and cops are too tightly interconnected. I think it would be wise for every single case where a cop fires a weapon, an investigation is done at the state level and state prosecutors, not the local guys who are tight with their buddies, should be the ones deciding whether or not to press charges. For grand juries, only the state level prosecutors should do the presentation. We saw in Ferguson what happens when a prosecutor makes a case that he wants to lose.
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I think Bill Maher is an opinionated asshole.
Society requires police officers. Unless someone believes that criminals can be trusted to refrain from stealing, looting, raping, and murdering the general population.
Self-defense is self-defense. Even LEO’s are entitled to use lethal force to defend themselves from grievous bodily harm or death.
Maybe asshole Bill should tell the criminals to refrain from acting like criminals?
“Wants to lose?” The state and FBI investigators didn’t find evidence that proved the case that MSNBC, and CNN, were trying very hard to make. The forensic evidence proved that what’s-his-name attacked a PO inside the police vehicle, and was charging the PO when the fatal shots were fired.
The prosector’s job is to convince a grand jury that an indictment was warranted. He gave the grand jury the defense’s side of the evidence as well as his own. You don’t do that when you’re trying to win a case.
If giving both sides of the story resulted in no true bill, then it’s overwhelmingly likely that the same thing would have happened at trial. Why waste the public’s time and money on a show trial you know you can’t win?
Do keep in mind the federal investigators also found no grounds to indict Wilson.
Because prosecutors normally argue both sides of a case before a jury? If that were the case, we would hardly ever get guilty verdicts in criminal cases.
It isn’t his job to help the defense. If he was a baseball manager, would we expect him to hand the opposing manager a list of pitches that his players couldn’t hit?
The fact remains that the police shoot a lot of people, many of them unarmed, many of them who pose no threat to them, and far too many of which are black. They currently merely have to say “I feared for my life” and get the get out of jail free card handed to them. This may have worked for generations, but now that we have video evidence of their savagery we need to address the problem of murderous policemen.
A prosecutor’s job is dependent on both a good working relationship with the local police and a reputation for putting bad guys behind bars. If he messes with the police, his ass is grass come election time.
Lawyers aren’t baseball managers. A lawyer should not be expected to attempt to pursue a case that he doesn’t think he can win. Frankly, the matter shouldn’t ever have gone to a grand jury in the first place - the only reason it did was to appease the mobs who were crying for Darren Wilson’s head on a platter and spinning a false narrative about how he shot Brown in the back while his hands were up and then looked him in the eye while executing him.
Really, it’s likely that even if the prosecutor had only delivered evidence that was favorable to an indictment, the grand jury still would’ve found no true bill, so you really ought to be thankful that the prosecutor made an effort to get all the evidence out into the light of day, so there could be no doubt in the minds of any rational person that Wilson is an innocent man.
Find a murderous policeman first and we’ll talk.
How about the clowns in Cleveland that decided to re-enact the final scene of Bonnie and Clyde? For the crime of Driving While Uppity.
The prosecutor’s job is to present the evidence/facts to the grand jury. The grand jury is also allowed to asked questions related to the case. If the forensic evidence convinced the grand jury, and it did, that Brown had committed a robbery, assaulted an officer, and charged at the officer who had to resort to lethal force to stop Brown, it doesn’t matter what MSNBC and CNN told their viewers. There was no case to win.
Finally, someone’s here to make a case for the OP.