Quote:
Originally Posted by Subby
molson - If a police officer uses his or her weapon to kill a person, there should be an outside, independent investigation. That doesn't happen for the most part ( which is described in this great piece on Politico). Life is sacred. When you take someone's life you better have a damn good reason.
And with respect to the taser - my second most pressing question, albeit far behind why the kid needed to be shot 6 times. It mystifies me why it wasn't used. What about that situation required lethal force? |
I don't live in Wisconsin and my state always uses outside agencies for officer force cases. And prosecutions of officers (and prosecutors, and public defenders, and judges) are always handled by conflict prosecutors as well. I've worked in offices that have received these conflict cases and have prosecuted officers. The agency the officer works for should never handle an investigation like this. I don't know how often things are handed over to outside agencies, but I guarantee it's not only Wisconsin.
Does taser deployment take the same amount of time as a firearm deployment? I have no idea. I do know in my jurisdiction, tasers are generally used to catch fleeing subjects, not as a defense against a subject attacking or charging you. I'd think a taser would be too clumsy and not necessarily effective in that kind of situation. I'd rather use the club than a taser to fend off force. But neither has the stopping power of bullets, if you're afraid for your life.
But even that said, whether lethal force was necessary isn't going to be the deciding factor in either a criminal or a civil case. That's just not the standard. Maybe DT's right, maybe we're only talking about morals here, in which case, sure, you can have a separate opinion about that. But if that's where we are, and this was just a crappy cop in a tactical sense, and that a better, braver officer would have handled things better, them I'm really not sure how productive the whole racism angle is. It more goes to show you how important good cops are. And it emphasizes how destructive it can be when good and bad cops are viewed with the same suspicion all the time, and how that suspicion and hostility shouldn't be validated and encouraged, and where we have these environments where no good cop would want to work.