The risks are very real, but they aren’t really the point. Police are the force of The State, the hired muscle there to “protect” those who try to detourn control of the state apparatus from the population they supposedly report to. The lives of citizens are considered forfeit by tyrants. People are free to go about their lives, provided that they are content to not make much of a difference. You are “free” at their sufferance, and their discretion. Which means that citizens are often not regarded as having any agency, rather, they are a resource to be exploited. Your “safety” is doublespeak - you can consider yourself “safe” if you are “safe” for them.
The primary force police use against the population is not restraint or deadly force - it is intimidation. The knowledge that people can be made to do practically anything, no matter what they believe to be right, in fear for their lives. Basically, for a person to live according to reason, their conscience, their better judgement - they cannot afford to fear being killed. Now, there might well be strategic reasons to mitigate risks and stay alive. But as a general principle, trying to remain alive in an impotent capacity for its own sake is fruitless. Merely being a citizen of a country which believes that they exercise power of life and death over you means that the risk is always present, even if you choose not to be aware of it. As our friend the OP burglary victim has discovered.
Is restraining a person who is acting violently, so that they are rendered unable to harm others or themselves, itself a violent act? I think that it is something of an ethical grey area. I think that if everybody can leave the scene alive is preferable.
Another problem is whether the violence of armed people against the unarmed is ever justified. So far as I am concerned, it is not. If a person threatens me with deadly force when I am unarmed, they are severely undermining whatever respect or cooperation they could hope for. Why should I give authority to anyone who would shoot an unarmed person? Why would anyone?
I learned that murder was when one person killed another. No exceptions. I remember arguments over whether it was acceptable to murder in self-defense. I understand that some people may have more restrictive definitions. And etymologically once could argue for less restrictive definitions.
But exempting the police, military, executioners, etc. isn’t just a more restrictive definition, it’s utterly incoherent doublespeak.
If this is the case then all I can see is a failed state with a bunch of sometimes dangerous local warlords committing mayhem, and your king is out of control.
Any reasonable person living in that service area now has a good reason not to call the police if they are the victims of a crime. It’s going to take more than an internal review exonerating the cops, before this one goes away.
The real issues are that the warrant should not have been issued and the police should not have proceeded as they did.
We need some authority to investigate improper use of SWAT resources. Maybe the feds will do it. “We won’t sell you any more surplus weapons at cut rate prices if you use them like idiots.”
Change starts at the top. To fix the f-ed up police culture, when an event like this happens, the police chief should be sacked immediately and marked as unemployable by any law enforcement agency. The next chief better rein in his little soldiers or face exactly the same fate. Eventually, we’ll get the law enforcement leadership we should have. Chiefs that tolerate this sort of ineptitude and disregard for the citizens they protect shouldn’t be allowed to serve anywhere. Fire the bad cops before you lose your job. That should be the goal of their first day in the chair.
Alright, I’ll treat these murderers exactly how I think I should be treated if I did the same thing and call them murderers. I think I’ll run the risk of being called a murderer the next time I smash into someone’s house in the middle of the night with a gun on the advice of a burgler. If I do that, please arrest me and put me in prison.
@Glitch: Ok, if you want to say that the legal definitions are privileged over common ones, that is fine, we will interpret your statements accordingly and I trust you will do the same in interpreting ours using the common usage of the same words. Personally, for the remainder of this thread I will interpret “commit a murder” to mean forcing a groups of crows into an asylum. And since “slaughter” refers specifically to killing animals for food, I will interpret “manslaughter” as a compound word meaning attempted cannibalism. See, arguing over the definitions of words matters in a court of law, but anywhere else there is usually something more important to focus on.
No, you cannot have your cake and eat it too. Your so called “common definitions” are not just unprivileged compared to the legal one - they are flat out wrong.
You do not get to call something murder when it is convenient to you, and call it something else when it isn’t. Your argument that you can call someone a murderer when they are not legally a murderer is absurd. Unless you are prepared to go on record stating you believe anyone in similar circumstances of legal empowerment to take actions which ultimately lead to gunfire and death - say US soldiers, for example - are murderers?
We have an obligation to the facts and to the truth. Exaggeration and willful inaccuracy or distortion of reality for the sake of outrage or for one’s political agenda is always wrong, no matter how noble your cause or how detestable what you oppose.
What on Earth are you talking about? It’s like you’ve never used a language before. If someone says this is “murder” they mean that they think that killing was unjustified and that the people who killed the man ought to be held responsible for it. They aren’t choosing the wrong word, they are choosing the word that will convey exactly that meaning to pretty nearly everyone (you excepted, apparently).
Person A: “That’s murder!”
Person B: “Do you think he should actually be charged with murder?”
Person A: “No, I don’t think it fits the legal definition and I’m sure it wouldn’t stand up in court.”
Is a completely reasonable conversation where no one used a “flat out wrong” definition of a word. Imagine how much time we all could have saved if we’d had that conversation instead of this one.
I want to be totally clear here. The police entered the home of a person who had done nothing wrong in the middle of the night and killed that person. You are saying that we must never “exaggerate” the harm done by choosing a strong or loaded word to describe that?
But what about the judge who issued a warrant based on the testimony of a known criminal and meth addict? We need to look very closely at this judge. Cops can show up asking for all sorts of bad warrants. It’s up to the judge to make the correct determination here.
You know that, even under common law murder standards, wanton indifference to human life can be the necessary state of mind for murder, and that premeditation is not required in every case, right?
This does not follow. Sometimes, yes, but it does depend on who they kill, and how, and why. If a sergeant ordered a private to kill a village full of women and children, execution-shooting-style, with no explanation or obvious reason, then yes I would call both of them murderers. That our military’s current rules may disagree is irrelevant.
Dictionaries and laws are both written by humans. They are necessarily incomplete, imprecise attempts to describe multidimensional, context-dependent meanings from one mind to another. Courts strive to limit themselves to agreed-upon denotations, but in practice they appeal constantly to centuries of case law and communal standards of what each word actually implies. A dictionary cannot be complete, since a word’s meaning in any context depends on the words surrounding it; the font or handwriting or spoken tone used; the appearance, socioecononmic status, and intentions (stated or implied) of the speaker/writer; the state of mind of the listener/reader; where the word is said; the relationship between the speaker/writer and the listener/reader; I’ll stop there. Point is, words come in to being and shift in meaning over time by getting used in a certain way by a certain community. They don’t have Platonic identities.
In this case, you are participating in a conversation in a community where everyone other than you is in agreement that, because of its emotional tone and the author’s intentions in evoking a certain kind of reaction and many of our feelings about the situation, the word “murder” fits. You don’t like that we are not talking like lawyers, and we, frankly, couldn’t care less.
Why would a warrant allowing the police to search a home for drugs require a SWAT team in the middle of the night?
Timeline: the burglar told them the meth he had on him when they picked him up wasn’t really his (how convenient); 6 hours later they obtained a warrant to search the home he had robbed; 1 hour after that (instead of waiting a few hours until daylight) they shot and killed the homeowner in his home, including shooting through a wall (good thing no children were in the next room, huh?); 44 hours later they concluded searching the home, having found NOTHING incriminating whatsoever.
There was never even a claim that there might be weapons in the home. It was a drug warrant. Again I ask: why does that automatically mean a SWAT team in the middle of the night is required?
a) The police are allowed to enter your house via a warrant (sometimes one where they don’t even have to announce themselves)
b) You are allowed to defend your house with deadly force
c) the police are allowed to defend themselves with deadly force
This would seem to be very likely to conclude with someone being dead for no good reason (either the homeowner in this case, or the policeman in the one I noted a while ago), and nobody being convicted of anything.
This seems ludicrous. There need to be some consequences for the judges issuing the warrants that allow this to happen. And no-knock warrants shouldn’t exist. I’m sorry if it makes it harder for the police to get the evidence they need for convictions, but this is stupid.
