Quote:
Originally Posted by cuervo72
And, don't we hold cops to a higher standard?
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"We" don't. We should, but we don't. There's a fetishization of police in this country on par with the military - anything but blind support gets treated as "you don't support our cops/troops!" And, to be fair, that extends not just to the DA's who don't bring charges, but to the juries who don't convict when the evidence is strong enough to merit those charges.
Police officers seldom face charges, let alone trials, for killings committed in the line of duty, and when the evidence appears egregious enough to force the DA's hand, the jury typically votes to acquit.
A police officer facing felony charges is half as likely to be convicted as a civilian facing felony charges - 33% conviction rate for a police officer facing felony charges compared with a 67% or so civilian rate.
Upon conviction, incarceration rates for a police officer drop to
1/4 that of civilians convicted of felonies; 48% of civilians with felony convictions do time, compared with 12% of police officers convicted of felonies.
To be fair, those felony convictions and incarcerations cover a wider range of felonious crimes than just those which result in death, but the other side of that is that those 12% who do serve time may be those accused of, say,
raping someone detained as part of a traffic stop.
And that's the thing. All too often, if a police officer fatally shoots someone, the rush to justification begins. Did he have a criminal past? Was he a "thug"? Etc. And that tends not to happen as much with other police misconduct. It's easy to throw the dead under the bus to protect the "thin blue line." It's a lot harder to do that to a living individual alleging rape.