Memories of the 28th Century

As a general matter I don’t protest police trying to do their jobs, but recent cases of Black people in Missouri and NY being killed by police officers seem to show that the legal ramifications of police killing people on the job is not considered as seriously as it should be. I am not someone who thinks that police should be prevented from doing their jobs, but there are legal responsibilities that they have; becoming a police officer does not exempt someone from any laws; it puts more legal responsibilities on a person.

For police, as with private citizens, there are times when force is required, and sometimes that has to be deadly force. Regardless of who uses deadly force, there has to be an adequate explanation, and such an explanation has to be public for it to be effective. Grand juries are not public, so the evidence does not immediately enter the public view. The public is left with little glimpses of what happened. After the investigation of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri the evidence was made available to the public. It will be sometime before the results will be generally accepted, but it is my opinion that Mr. Brown approached the policeman, Darren Wilson, after he was ordered to stop and stand, and apparently Brown was reaching for the cop’s handgun, because one of the bullets went through Brown’s hand. There were six bullets fired, and that suggests that the cop panicked; the last couple would have hit a dead man. It’s my opinion that Darren Wilson fired in self-defense, and I believe that a jury would have ruled that way. It might have been a good idea if there had been a public trial of Mr. Wilson; it would have cleared the air. The Eric Garner case wasn’t as clear.

Eric Garner was struggling, but there was no clear reason why he was being arrested at all, and he had medical problems. But it is clear from the video that he was subdued well before he stopped breathing. Regardless of anything else he died at the hands of the police, and there were several police officers engaged in subduing him; so all of the police should have been tried for his death. Even if there will be no criminal charges, Garner’s family should be suing all of the police who had a hand in the death for “wrongful death”. The evidence that has come out doesn’t seem to show that Garner’s death was not wrongful, so the suit would be reasonable.

Those two cases Eric Garner and Michael Brown may give us some ideas about a more thorough way to improve the situation. Police attempt protect themselves and the public. Everyone tries to protect himself; it is part of self-preservation, and it is common to all living things that I know of. We can’t expect people to stop trying to defend themselves when they are faced with a threat to their lives, but we might consider improving the training of police, so that they would not seem as threatening to so many people. When someone who is armed with lethal weapons approaches someone, it can be and probably should be frightening. We might take the weapons out of the hands of police; police in the UK don’t usually carry weapons, and they aren’t murdered all that often. There has been the argument that the police should be as well armed as the criminals, and the reply to that is that most criminals don’t use weapons; they use their bodies, fists, etc.

We might also look at what is criminal. There are many activities that violate some statute but that are not offenses against persons or property. Gambling, prostitution, and much drug use are illegal, and these three activities have attracted the attention and business organization of organized crime, because they are money makers, and they are relatively easy to organize. Apparently there was a question as to whether Eric Garner had illegal tobacco. If that was the reason him to be arrested, then it would have been better for everyone, if he had been handed a citation or a summons.

Apparently no one has thoroughly investigated how many people have been killed by police. The link to “Another much Higher Count. . .” suggests that more than 1100 a year are killed every year by police in the U.S.A. More information about the cases would be necessary for that number to be accepted as fact, but it indicates that there are not adequate statistics on crime.
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/a...ice-homicides/

I was hoping that I could reach a few solid conclusions about police killing their employers, but we don’t even know how often it happens. We can be pretty confident that someone acts badly in every case, but we don’t know whether the police or others are acting badly more often. We don’t even known if there was another crime that triggered the incidence. One thing that we do know is that many police had very bad attitudes about many people, but there are many people who have bad attitudes about police, so things are fairly even there.

One thing that the Brown and Garner cases showed clearly is that grand juries can be wrong, but I haven't seen all of the evidence in the Garner case. Garner's death was ruled homocide, but blame wasn't assigned to any individual; it appeared that there was a group that was responsible, and I still think that there should be an attempt to have them found responsible in a civil action. And it might be a good idea in cases like this to have a public trial to make certain that the evidence has been made available to the public.

One thing that would certainly help would be for police to remember that they work for the citizens. There is no excuse for them to be anything except respectful toward the people that they encounter. They should remember that the citizens pay them, and showing disrepect for one's employer is usually grounds for dismissal.