Except in the literal billions of public contacts performed every year by 800K+ LEOs that hardly ever actually happens except in your imagination. A huge, huge majority of officers retire without ever firing their weapon in the course of duty,
So why don’t you go to the funeral of unarmed people murdered by cops and tell their families that there’s nothing to worry about, lots of LEOs manage to avoid murdering people every day?
And officers getting killed happens even less than that thing that “hardly ever happens”. By quite a large factor. So surely, we shouldn’t worry at all about that.
Meanwhile, even though cops killing innocents is rare, you know what’s really, really common? Cops defending cops who kill innocents. That has a prevalence of close to 100%.
I saw you mention that mayors and governors enjoy their armed escorts, which I’m sure is true. But the vast majority of officers the public interact with aren’t the ones on duty protecting a government official. I also don’t get how those officials would benefit by telling officers, whether it’s those on their personal protective detail or the all the officers in the departments under their authority, to avoid focusing on “serving and protecting” the general public.
In other words, yes, technically it is the job of law enforcement to enforce the law. What is left unsaid is that the purpose of the law should be to maintain a safe public environment so that ordinary people can go about their daily lives without fear of harm coming to them, regardless of the source. AKA to serve and protect.
Like he said, it never was to serve and protect you and me. Modern police forces were created to serve the interests of the state and its property-owning stakeholders and protect them from you and me, were we to decide we don’t want to play by their rules any more.
That extends incidentally to enforcing the law when you and I may be victims of wrongdoing, so that there is no state of anarchy that delegitimizes the system.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but the US has never had a police force act as a praetorian guard and install mayors or governors at their whim. Even cops-to-mayors like Tom Bradley or Frank Rizzo or Joe Arpaio who were indeed chummy with brutal, corrupt police forces, still had to keep the downtown businessmen and suburban PTAs and an army of non-police bureaucrats happy.
The police are kept happy the same way Hemingway and Bill Mauldin noticed how military police are kept happy: they get to swagger like soldiers while not really facing anything like a soldier’s battle environment. The ownership class give the police the same consolation prize that the English gave the Scots or the Austrians gave the Hungarians: “yes, you’re our dogs, but you get to bite those other animals we need bitten.”
However, that can’t discount the things the police do outside that dynamic. Those suburban PTA families throw away some of their kids all the time: for being gay or trouble or for no reason at all. The business community has no use for them. They wind up living on the streets, where, believe it or not, what little kindness they receive comes from a cop. They wind up dead in an alley and what little justice they get comes from the cops too. We need to acknowledge those facts to, and help.
Mod note: I read the post you objected to (which was not directed to you anyway) and found the same implication you denied. Tone down your language.
sentencing has happened. she will serve 16 months with good behaviour and the rest with supervised release.
I’m comfortable with that sentence. Potter made a tragic error in a moment of stress. It could happen to anyone. She deserves punishment for her actions.
Yeah but is the police department being punished? They should be.
The city probably paid a settlement to the family.
I’ve seen it done in similar cases. George Floyd’s family settled for $27 million. Minneapolis paid a historic amount.
Been out fairly soon then. She has been in jail nearly a year.
On Monday, April 24.
Why would any sane person choose to become a police officer after this?
It’s extremely unlikely that a cop kills even a single person over the course of their employment. Even less likely that they are held accountable for it.
Anyone who is turned away from a career in law enforcement after hearing a story like this is exactly the sort of person with questionable judgement that we wouldn’t want on the force.
Exactly this. Anyone whose reaction to “if you kill a suspect for no reason there will be (minimal) consequences” is to leave the force should never have been on the force to begin with.
…well the NYPD just got a pay raise backdated to 2017, and are currently $100 million over the overtime budget, so I don’t think that the rare case where the officer obviously screwed up and actually faced some consequences will stop people wanting to become a police officer, IMHO.
But that’s not the problem. The problem is people wondering if as police they would be in danger of being sent to prison for defending their lives due to Monday-morning quarterbacking and a “not a single black life more” stance by some militants.
I thought the problem was that the police could do things like kill a 12 year-old boy with a toy gun without even five seconds spent assessing the situation and suffer no consequences.
No, the problem is the fact that police in the US kill people at a rate that dwarfs any comparable nation.