25% of people shot to death by LA police were unarmed. No cops were prosecuted

boing
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Dear America:

Wake the fuck up.

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Systems, governments, organizations which promote or conveniently omit disagreement with cowardice and murder are complicit. That’s not to say that a daycare center that doesn’t make an official statement denouncing police violence is condoning police violence. But organizations that are closely related to police violence, such as police unions, who don’t take steps to curb actual violence or even mitigate public perception of violence are complicit in that violence.

Their stance so far has been, essentially, “MORE OF THIS BECAUSE THE CRIMINALS HAVE THE UPPER HAND.” Which is missing the obvious point and why they need to be told what to do by an organized public. Like the colossal failure of businesses policing themselves environmentally, the police need to be policed by an outside entity because they cannot, as a group, see the damage they are causing.

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Edit: This post is too long and rambling. I should have just said “good call” and “moar body cameras!”

Hmmm… it’s a strong argument. Thanks; I’ll stop calling it corruption.

The weakest point in that mechanism is The jury is more likely to believe the cop than the person who was shot, if the person who was shot is even around to tell their side of the story.

I guess one way to attack this weak point is to try to get the real information out to every person in America about the characteristic behavior of our brutal and ineffective law enforcement system. That’s what @xeni is doing, I see. Remove the assumption of good police work and make them truly prove they had good reason for action, beyond all reasonable doubt. This will be a difficult endeavor given our “innocent until proven guilty” judicial system.

Perhaps laws could be passed forever banning uniformed killers from ever holding law enforcement jobs or any other employment that permits them to be armed on duty? It would be very hard to persuade the American people that this would be “fair”, unfortunately, since it would necessarily mean that some cops who killed in justifiable circumstances would be banned, and we usually only mete out lifetime punishments to child molesters and recreational drug abusers.

Personally I’m going to try to spread my belief that “I was scared” can never be a valid justification for a trained officer of the law to shoot an unarmed person. That defense should only be available to citizens who are not in any way involved with law enforcement; demonstrated inability to make a correct assessment of danger is clear proof of an inability to meet the requirements of the job. Even if a killer cop wins a court case s/he should still be fired for non-performance, just like any non-cop who failed to do their job adequately would be. Cowardice and poor judgement may be forgivable, but it ought to be a disqualifying factor for LEOs, just as having no arms would make a person unfit to be a major league baseball pitcher. I shall hope to eventually convince some mayors and police chiefs of this.

Mostly offtopic, but in a lame attempt to explain my use of the word “corruption” above: corruption in my US state almost never involves payoffs or coercion. Threats are subtle and no money changes hands. It’s an Old Boy Network of mutual favors and the police are very much a part of it, although certainly a minor part. If you offend a Wilmington cop and you don’t live in Wilmington, you may get a 2am visit from the state and/or county police - and your visitors will not have been paid or coerced in any way. Corruption just doesn’t work like that here. When we say “corrupt” we mean broken, double-dealing, infested, debased, diseased, perverted from its original intention, because that well describes the systemic corruption that is prevalent here.

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Fair enough. I there are lots of kinds of corruption, and I shouldn’t be so narrow. In this case, I wanted to highlight that I think the justice system can do a pretty good job of excusing police behaviour even without actual corruption, which would include things well beyond out-and-out bribes and probably most often takes the form of just using the authority of the badge to act on personal grudges.

I like your point that cops should be held to a higher standard than ordinary people for self defense instead of a lower one, it’s just a little hard to imagine it happening. It’s pretty easy to think that as cops are the ones who are tasked with dealing with murderers, it makes sense that they are more likely to kill people in self defense than anyone else is - they simply get into more situations where self defense is warranted. Plus, if you bring up that cops are expected to have better judgment in those situations, for a lot of people what that means is that cops are assumed to actually have that better judgment, which is why juries are more likely to take their word about what happened.

That a cop ought to have a deeper well of options than non-cop, on average, is an extra level of analysis that you can only add on if you feel you can objectively assess the reasonability of the self-defense claim to begin with. But I think most people emotionally assess that. They imagine themselves in the position of the police officer who did the shooting and think “What would I have done?” But people think of cops as people who shoot bad guys because that’s how they sell themselves, so imagine you were a cop in that situation, what would you have done? Shoot the bad guys.

Which is something I was thinking about when I was writing before. I know I was kind of intentionally inflammatory about American gun culture, but there are a lot more things going on, and a lot of them dip into what I would easily call corruption. The American idea of criminal justice - in service of the private prison money machine - is that there are good guys and bad guys. Like with Michael Brown’s shooting or Trayvon Martin, the defend-the-shooter - who doesn’t always even need to be a cop - line is to talk about how the person who got shot had a history of petty crimes, or wasn’t a nice person, etc. Many of us sit and watch that in horror, as if the correct punishment for shoplifting is summary execution in the street. But that’s kind of the story that the American criminal justice system is built on - a children’s game of cops and robbers.

So the fact that the guy the cop shot has a shoplifting conviction somehow does become the thing that exonerates the cop. The guy was a Bad Guy™, and bad guys get what’s coming to them. Or if the guy was running away, well, who runs away? Bad Guys™, obviously.

And I love to take pot-shots at the idea of personal responsibility, but in reality personal responsibility is a great thing. But while I assume (from what I know of you on the BBS) your variety of personal responsibility is of the “There’s a mess here, I’d better figure out how to clean it up” variety, the phrase is very often invoked by people who mean “There’s a mess here, I’d better figure out who is responsible so they can clean it up.” It’s the “personal responsibility” used as an excuse to never take responsibility. As if every police officer weren’t responsible for a culture of covering up for cops who kill. As if every citizen weren’t responsible for the blood their democratically elected government is spilling. Put it on the individual who did it, and them alone. Like I said, it’s ironic that is justified by a philosophy of “personal responsibility.”

Like you are ever going to be more long and rambling than me.

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