An officer (or one who acknowledges paragraph 2 as written as true, anyway) will probably tell you that the two are related, and they might not even be wrong. But even if it is true, policing is sort of a special case with regard to occupational hazard. They most likely had the opportunity to incapacitate this guy rather than kill him (at least in hindsight,) but in general they really do need to be ready for the possibility that someone will try to kill or injure them to avoid being arrested. They spend a lot of time interacting with the most dangerous people in their given area and it does happen. Unlike any other job though, they can't just do whatever to keep their jobs as safe as possible because they also need to minimize the use of force and carefully follow inconvenient procedures to avoid violating people's rights. It really isn't an enviable position to be in.
I don't disagree with anything here. But when you take the subject in this direction, the object of discussion becomes whether or not police are really beneficial when allowed to operate on this standard?
I fear police more than I do a criminal.
A criminal threat to my person is generally either someone I've pissed off, someone who wants something, or someone who is simply behaving irrationally. I have the potential to respond to all 3. I may fail and be hurt, but the potential is there for me to take care of myself. And I can generally make efforts to avoid including problematic people or places in my life who would bring this kind of trouble, which goes a very long way.
In an interaction with an officer, I need to worry about whether that officer is corrupt, because there are plenty of police who are criminals too. Who steal from people and enjoy being violent. I'm not being accusational against the law enforcement establishment in general, or making any claim about how prevalent this problem is. Simply stating a fact. But more importantly, I need to be intensely aware of my body language, tone of voice, whether any movement I make may be seen as too sudden or unusual, if my hands are visible, or if it's ok for my hands not to be visible for some practical reason. There are any number of accidental and completely innocent ways I can make an officer question my intentions enough to decide in a split second that they are risking their own safety if I'm not eliminated immediately. And if something goes wrong in an interaction with an officer, I have no opportunity to defend myself. Zero recourse. And there is no avoiding that you are going to interact with police once in a while.
There are huge ongoing national debates over terrorism and mass shootings in the U.S., but police have consistently killed more people under questionable circumstances than both of those problems.
It's not fair to blame individual cops for acting on a split-second decision when it's been pounded into them that hesitating can get them or others killed. Blame the gun culture which helps create situations which lead to that outlook on the part of PDs. Blame laws which set a very low bar for the legal use of lethal force by police. Blame people who raise their children to be hostile towards police in routine interactions. Don't blame people who unintentionally trigger those warnings for LEOs.
I totally agree. People shouldn't be hostile towards police. They should be compliant, even when faced with unreasonable or illegal requests. I also believe people should avoid police involvement and interaction as much as possible. I loathe gun culture, and really wish guns didn't even exist.
But above all for the purposes of this thread, I think police should be legally held to higher standards of behavior. They should be held more accountable. Because after watching so goddamn much video footage of police killing people, it can be plainly seen in the way they behave that they take it for granted that they can deal with any situation by lethal force. If they didn't, so much behavior would be different. For example, if there was a guy with a knife and no bystanders in nearby danger, they wouldn't immediately pull up into lunging range, willfully creating the pretense of a self-defense situation. They would negotiate agitated people from a distance before approaching, instead of immediately jumping to man-handling and then excusing the outcome later with "he could have taken my gun". They wouldn't take the first steps in introducing violence into situations that previously showed no signs of being violent.
Also, check your numbers. The FBI's statistics on LEOs feloniously killed while on duty averages out at ~64 per year, with 51 in the year the report was published (2014). Another report from February notes a higher rate of LEO felonious deaths than in the same span last year.
It's not anything like it was in the '20s or '30s, but a good number of cops are still shot or intentionally run over every year, enough for them to keep justifying their paranoia. That's the nature of police work in a country where just about anyone can be armed and a large portion of the population is actively hostile towards cops for one reason or another. It doesn't make it right, but it explains why it happens.
You sorta seem to be putting the chicken before the egg here. The police paranoia exists because this was and is a genuinely dangerous country to be a cop in. You can't talk on one hand about our gun-related murder rate being markedly higher than any other first-world country (and plenty of others beside) and then pretend that that isn't going to affect police culture.
Don't agree as much here. The numbers you just stated are roughly on par with the link I shared. And it's a ridiculously low number in relation to the total numbers of law enforcement on duty, and compared to all the rhetoric about how dangerous policing is. Like I said, there are official statistics put out every year on occupational casualties, and law enforcement is never in the top 10. You cited 51 felonious deaths in 2014. The total number of police deaths in 2014 was 97 - near double that. And it was STILL only #15 on the list. Taxi drivers were 38% more likely to be killed on the job than police, and
in 2013 were twice as likely to be murdered. Do you think our culture would accept if taxi drivers began killing their passengers when they reach into a bag or pocket too quickly?
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Topic: The Abusive Policing Thread: Beyond Brown, No Justice (Read 446313 times)