Quote:
Originally Posted by SackAttack
"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. |
There's two types of homicides that are very different under U.S. law than all others in that they pose more difficult questions for judges, prosecutors, and jurors because of the issues of how to prove the required intent, and how the relevant statutes are written. One is homicides committed by people who have a concern for their safety. And the other is homicides committed by people who have a lawful authority to seize the other person, and to use any force necessary to carry out that seizure if there's resistance. And obviously there's lots of scenarios where those two types overlap. Police officer is definitely the occupation that's going to be involved in both scenario the most.
So yes, a police officer homicide IS usually different. The law requires that. But civilians who commit homicides in under either category are also usually very difficult cases, also can be the subject of reasonable disagreements, and also usually have a period of prosecutor review before any charges are filed. We've seen plenty of controversial cases involving citizens arguably using self-defense. And when they're using that self-defense against someone who has committed a crime, that second category plays a part too. In most states, citizens have the same power to seize suspected criminals that police do (we tend to highly discourage that as a society, but these legal issues come up when it actually happens). Whenever you have grey areas and reasonable disagreements, race can be more of factor, both because racial motives of the perpetrator can be hidden, or just suspected. And people will always look to race to explain things that can't immediately be explained in other ways.
So maybe we're having a shift in society where more people want to move the goalposts over some, move the self-defense and seizure law to make more of those homicides criminal, and move more of the cases that might be manslaughter today into murder categories. State legislatures can change self-defense and use of force statutes. Civil liability through 4th Amendment Seizure law is trickier because it's constitutional and up to the interpretation of courts, but obviously that can be changed too. What we can't do is change things mid-stream to pending cases.
Prosecutors don't always like the law either but they're bound to follow it. I declined prosecution for plenty of cases where the defendant was a dickhead but where I just couldn't ethically bring a charge. That can make police officers involved in the case very upset, when you dismiss the cases they were involved with. Phone calls to complaining parties telling them you're declining prosecution is very difficult too. There's this reaction that police officers have, just like regular citizens have, where they assume the criminal law matches up with their own sense of moral justice, and assume someone is out to get them or being racist or is being incompetent when it doesn't end up like that upon review of others.
But the criminal law is not supposed to match up exactly with our morals. It's supposed to be much harder to convict people than it is to morally judge them. And it's supposed to much harder to convict someone of a higher-degree crime than a lower-degree crime. And it really is in those two categories of homicides. And it's not just when those categories involve police officers. Self-defense and seizure violent crime cases are brutal because they never feel right, people are usually going to disagree, and someone is guaranteed to feel there's been an injustice.
We can move in the direction of reducing the right of self-defense in criminal cases, and reducing the power of police officers to use force. I don't understand why that's not the focus of the effort though. Instead, the focus is on broadly imposing moral judgments and assigning negative characteristics on BLM and police officers. If people actually wanted practical change, instead of just using the situations as an opportunity to proclaim their moral superiority over groups they don't like anyway, they'd do it through the law, and through the courts, and through city, state, and county governments who fund and regulates these police departments. But too many people don't really want those positive changes, they just want to judge others that they feel superior too. That pushes the groups further apart and minimizes the positive impact that police officers and BLM activists can have.
And those are the most important people in effectuating change, the people actually doing things - the police officers, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, teachers, other public servants, BLM activists, other community leaders, etc. They ultimately have to be the solution. (Though, there will never be a "solution", because humans are involved and we can't be perfect, but those are the groups that can spur improvement most directly, and they've done a pretty great job collectively at doing that, if you look back how things have changed over the decades).