So, instead of "don't support laws you aren't willing to kill to have enforced", perhaps, "don't support militarized police" would be the better recommendation.
Which problem do you expect to be fixed first? Every new crime can be fought right in the legislature here and now. Who can demilitarize the police?
[EDIT:] Are police unions, bar associations, and armaments manufacturers just going to sit out the session in which you get your miraculous "just do the right thing ok cops?" law passed? I can't believe that someone as knowledgeable as yourself really thinks that way...
Demilitarizing the police takes building a coalition for a single, focused, legislative action. Preventing all new, and eliminating all existing, legislation that you aren't willing to have the state kill to enforce requires a lot more.
So, I'd say that demilitarizing the police is a lot easier.
> Every new crime can be fought right in the legislature here and now. Who can demilitarize the police?
Demilitarizing the police can be fought right in the legislature, here and now, too.
EDIT (to respond to yours):
> [EDIT:] Are police unions, bar associations, and armaments manufacturers just going to sit out the session in which you get your miraculous "just do the right thing ok cops?" law passed?
I don't see bar associations particularly likely to oppose demilitarizing police; OTOH, police unions are often opponents of efforts to decriminalize minor offenses that are useful as pretexts (and often are sponsors of new criminalization of this type.) So, is it easier to build a coalition to beat them on one point, or thousands?
Actually lawyers like to work, so as a whole they like lots of complicated awful laws to keep the courts crowded all the time. Think a little more deeply about how special interests function, however. The NRA really cares about gun control, and few others do, so they get their way. The teachers' unions really care about public education policy, and few others do, so they get their way. Likewise, those who profit from our awful "justice" system really like that profit, so any giant attempt to destroy their entire world will get demolished. We may never know who invented this "one wonderful law will save us" meme, but one doubts he worked on the side of good. We've got to start by eating around the margins of the problem.
> Actually lawyers like to work, so as a whole they like lots of complicated awful laws to keep the courts crowded all the time.
That's a popular stereotype, but -- especially in any way relevant to the kind of criminal offenses at issue in this discussion -- its not borne out at all, AFAICT, by the actual history of bar association lobbying.
Lots of countries don't have a literal war on drugs. Lots of countries don't have racials issues stemming from slavery. But what is amazing is those countries that do have higher levels of violence.
Lots of countries don't have a literal war on drugs. Lots of countries don't have racials issues stemming from slavery. But what is amazing is those countries that do have higher levels of violence.
I've been something like this for days.. Why are the police pulling people over for busted tailights/etc? Isn't having a yearly car inspection regime enough? How frequently do tail lights burn out, and is it that critical to everyone's safety that it gets fixed as soon as cop sees it or can it wait for a few months until the state inspection. Don't most cars have some kind of indicator that a light is blown? Basically the vast majority interactions most people have with the police are when they are acting like thugs/tax collectors and enforcing fee's for minor infractions of laws that weren't even on the books more than a couple dozen years ago and for the most part haven't done anything to improve safety.
Basically, the police culture seems to focus on over-policing useless things like traffic enforcement while under-policing dangerous parts of town with beat cops.
I don't know the answer. That said, in other countries lots of the cars which are allowed on the road in the US are not allowed on the roads. Sometimes its vehicle age, sometimes it's not keeping up the vehicle, etc. So, we're not the most demanding --on the other hand, at least as it concerns cities, we don't offer great alternatives in the form of public transit. Rural transit is not typically that much better.
Non-working lights makes a vehicle unsafe to drive in conditions that require it (night, rain, snow, fog, tunnel).
When I used to drive regularly I would often see cars with non-working lights. Most people probably aren't even aware that their light is not working. Anyone who can get the driver's attention and inform them of the problem is performing a service for everyone near roads.
Yeah cause having a little card in their pocket stops people from driving in an unsafe fashion
Also seems to assume license testing is standardized with rigorous instruction regarding safety.
Some states don't require anything more than successfully completing a multiple choice test about signals and signs many folks end up ignoring anyway, and a brief on road exam.
People go in and drive safely for the 20 mins their subjected to a road test and sink into bad habits all the time.
I personally saw a wobbly 75 year old man with shakey hands (he updated his signature wearing coke bottle thick glasses) and a cane get his license renewal rubber stamped
As I understand, you don't need a license to drive a car under most state laws -- you just need a license to drive a car on public roads (or, IIRC, in certain cases, on private property where the property owner has opted in to enforcement of public traffic laws.)
Philando Castile was pulled over 52 times because police target black men with hostile situations that could get escalated to searches and small-time drug busts.
The answer is to end the Drug War and to repeal the "junk" infractions that enable police to initiate contact with minorities for no good reason.
> Basically, the police culture seems to focus on over-policing useless things like traffic enforcement while under-policing dangerous parts of town with beat cops.
This is a favored way of policing because it has a ton of advantages for the police and town:
1. You raise revenue. The amount raised more than offsets whatever costs you incur in enforcement. In some towns, it's the majority of their budget.
2. It allows you to screen for prior infractions. Warrants, unpaid tickets, etc. You can then take them into custody and impound the vehicle. The vehicle is extremely liquid and frequently worth quite a bit of $$$.
3. It is much safer than walking the beat in a dangerous part of town. The driver is frequently restricted within the vehicle and the officer has clear visibility into the vehicle.
4. The officer is frequently stationary in the vehicle with his laptop, internet, etc. This is much more comfortable than walking on the street or even actively patrolling in the vehicle. Why go to them, when they can come to you?
Doesn't really change anything. If you make it so the police won't stop you for a broken tail light, will you keep it so they can stop you for driving with an expired inspection sticker? If so, you have to accept that the consequence may be death for a person who refuses to pull over because their inspection was expired because they had a broken tail light.
This is the problem in USA, in a nutshell. We have some amorphous mental picture of how law enforcement works, instilled by an unholy mashup of local TV news and cop movies, and we cannot abide any public innovation or experimentation in that.
Of course, in so doing, we tolerate all manner of unpublicized "innovation" on the part of LEOs: asset forfeiture, stingray surveillance, parallel construction, profiling, qualified immunity, "special-needs" exceptions, etc. So we have a ratchet in this nation, in which occasional gains in freedom on the part of particular groups are more than offset by regular losses from everyone else.
If a nonviolent suspect "runs" from law enforcement, then send her a notice of fine, in the mail. It works for the credit card companies...
Right. So if I've kidnapped someone, and have them stashed in my trunk, and I run from the cops, they're going to send me a notice of a fine in the mail. Sure, that'll work. Right...
Even with edge cases the overall body count would go down a lot. Once the cops have eyes on a plate number figuring out who was in the vehicle at that time and tracking them down is straightforward and much lower risk.
No. But if the officers don't know for certain that I've done it, then they can't classify me as violent, even when I run from them when they want to look in my trunk...
Why do they want to look in your trunk? If they have a good reason, then you're violent, and they chase you. That is a vanishingly rare occurrence relative to the number of times when cops are just profiling, and so they stop 500 black dudes to catch one with some pot in his trunk, while studiously failing to stop a corresponding 500 white women. It ain't a perfect world, and cops have no duty to help the public. One would simply like to see them adopt the physicians' philosophy of doing no harm.
No, I'm only possibly violent. "Suspect is a white male driving a blue Ford Escort." "Hey, there's a white male driving a blue Ford Escort." "Is he the kidnapper?" "Don't know, but let's stop him and search his car."
But I've got pot in my trunk, or something I lifted from the local Walmart, or I'm paranoid, or I'm in a hurry, or whatever. Now what? Do they make me stop, or do they not?
Look, I'm not trying to justify profiling. But the world is not as black and white as you think it is...
If we're talking about a local, recent, actual (i.e. not a custody dispute) kidnapping then sure stop all the white dudes driving a blue Escort. It's clearly against the Constitution and common sense, but concerned citizens have feelings, so fuck that shit. For the sake of argument, we've stipulated that driving a blue Escort in particular very rare circumstances constitutes violence.
Now back in actual everyday reality, can we also agree that 99.8% of the cases in which dudes are stopped and their trunks searched do not constitute violence? I mean, other than on the part of the State...
> It's clearly against the Constitution and common sense...
It's against the Constitution to stop people who fit the description of someone who just committed a major crime? I'd like to see you cite a paragraph of the Constitution that supports your position.
It's against common sense? I'd like to see you support that assertion as well.
> Tell me some more about what I think!
In your posts, you gave evidence that you seemed to think that using force to stop suspects was not warranted. I gave reasons why I thought sometimes it was, and therefore that your view was too simplistic - too black and white. You grudgingly acknowledged my counterexample, but got offended that I claimed your view was too black and white. You seem to think I'm ascribing to you views that you don't actually hold. But I'm not trying to read your mind. I'm just reading your words. If I'm misreading them, clarifying might be a more useful approach...
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
Most cars don't come with indicators that a light is blown.
It's unsafe to drive around with non-working lights, mostly because it interferes with other drivers' expectations (working brake-lights and working tail-lights, light geometry allows guesstimation of car dimensions), but also because it can impair the driver's own visibility.
But presumably these could be dealt with friendly warnings, and not a cause for fines or arrest. However, once the traffic stop is made, the officer has wide berth on how to respond, making it ultimately very subjective.
Just a side note. Living in the states I went to make a left turn. I turned on my signal and waited for oncoming traffic to clear. I was about to make a left and someone behind me passed me on the left! I almost turned right into him as he flew past. I wondered what the heck happened why would he pass on left. I pulled in driveway and tested my blinker and it was out. Not using that to refute your premise, it just made me think of it.
I can't think of a scenario where you were able to do a legal left turn and it was legal to pass you on the left so they were almost certainly doing something illegal or you were not in the correct lane to turn left...
On a one lane road with a broken single yellow line, possibly turning into a driveway. I generally get very cautious about people going way too slow for a road and wouldn't whip past them, but possibly the other driver thought that OP was stalled?
That was the road scenario. I had brake lights and only had been stopped for 30 seconds or so. I am pretty cautious as well and happened to look back a little and saw them just in time. It was a SUV also so that could have been very bad.
>can it wait for a few months until the state inspection
I see cars whose bodies are 75% duct-taped garbage bags on a daily basis. I hear cars with nonworking mufflers on a daily basis. Our culture is that if you don't have the cash on hand or the inclination to repair your car after a devastating crash or serious failure (but it still drives), you simply keep driving it.
I'm pretty sure the extent of "inspection" in the handful of locales where it exists is "is it throwing any emissions-related OBD codes?"
If you're alluding to the Philando Castile shooting, he wasn't pulled over because of his tail lights, which were actually working[1]. Rather, the police officer thought that Castile looked like a robbery suspect[2] and the tail light thing was just a pretext.
It would have been unwise to tell a robbery suspect "please sit tight since I think you look similar to the robber from the recent BOLO alert [1]". If the person is not the actual robber it would bring unnecessary tension; and if he is, then he will know that there is already no way out, since the police is onto him.
Your #2 link says that the relevant police have not confirmed the authenticity of the recording from an unnamed source..and the article was posted three days ago and contains 9 spamvertisements.
The #2 link seems to be the closest we have to the original source. It's a news gathering operation run by the CBS broadcast television affiliate in the MSP region where the events in question transpired. The person making the scanner recording hasn't posted it anywhere that I know of. If you know of a better source, I'll gladly change the link, but this is the source everyone else is ultimately linking to.
As for the police not verifying the recording, that's not unusual. Police don't tend to comment on pending investigations unless they need something from the public. In any case, the shooter's attorney has largely confirmed the information in the recording[1]. It could still be a fake, but if it is, it's a good one based on information not publicly available until days later.
I linked to that additional article as confirmation that the shooter thought that Castile looked like a robbery suspect. While the article doesn't have any direct quotes to that effect, it paraphrases him saying as much.
The claim that the shooter called in the stop before he made it is unremarkable because that's standard practice. In fact, it'd be more unusual if he hadn't called it in. Doubly so when stopping a suspected armed robber. A big reason why officers call in every stop is so that if the stop goes sideways and they are never heard from again, at least dispatch got the plate so investigators know where to begin.
I'd wager most news operations use Radio Reference these days rather than worry running all that gear and archiving all that audio themselves. Some of the relevant streams were down that night[1], probably explaining why there aren't other copies floating around.
I'd wager you can setup a scanner and more than a year of storage for <$100. The total volume of the setup would be a very small cube that would just need to be attached to an antenna.
There is really no excuse not to be doing it at this point. Especially when third parties are proven unreliable.
Cops operate with the logic of predators[1]. If something "looks fishy" they figure it is fishy.
Most of the problems with police/citizen interaction have to do with citizens not behaving in a manner that supports the severe information asymmetries of those encounters.
[1] I don't mean they ARE predators, but that the information processing they use looks like what predators use - a detail out of place will trigger interest in further evaluation.
> a detail out of place will trigger interest in further evaluation
Non-predators behave this way as well. I think you meant to say that police operate with the logic of animals that aren't inherently afraid of their surroundings, which makes sense. Police shouldn't be afraid to investigate.
That's kind of open ended. Unfortunately we've seen time again the police can't be trusted to self police. And they'll mace, taze, or shoot anyone that doesn't obey.
But they should have carte Blanche to poke at anything anywhere anytime they please?
Yeah no.
There should be a set of limits which they're trained in. And they should be afraid to investigate outside those limits.
Id rather tie their hands than allow a bunch of GI Joe wannabes do whatever they please.
> they should have carte Blanche to poke at anything anywhere anytime they please
They don't. We have really, really extensive laws (including the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution) preventing them from doing that. If they illegally search you, the evidence is useless (and often the conviction becomes impossible).
What you're describing is something out of 1984, not the reality of the hundreds of millions of police interactions in the US every year.
Perhaps I'm old school ( or perhaps warped :) but I do divide animals into predators and prey ( at least in pairwise relationships ) . The salient difference is exactly what you describe.
There are, of course, animals that are neither but they're fewer in number.
Because driving with a busted taillight is illegal? I've had a similar situation where I had an electrical problem and the taillights were out in my car. (Brake lights still worked). Got pulled over and cited for driving without insurance. The original investigation into a minor traffic violation escalated to a bigger infraction, and a bigger fine.
It's a very common police tactic to start with a minor infraction then investigate to find any further violations. This isn't wrong, and is actually good police work. But it can be easy to abuse if applied with a racial bias, or some other prejudice. (And which is why independent police oversight is a necessity. Not just for high-profile killings, but also for monitoring how law enforcement operates in the community in small ways).
Police have become the threat that the Founders feared when they talked about the dangers of a standing army. Either they need to be armed with non-lethal weapons only, or they need to stand trial for each killing (severally and collectively), or both.
I don't see how this follows. Not all laws permit use of deadly force. And it's not even the laws per se as much as the circumstances and criteria around authorization of deadly force. I've been trying to learn about this lately, and it seems as though the supreme court case Graham v. Connor [1] is heavily implicated in the fact that very few of these police are convicted despite how objectionable the circumstances have seemed.
As a side note, if you're interested in this type of thing, Radiolab has just started an excellent podcast on supreme court cases called More Perfect [2].
Except that the implication here is that the laws precipitate the use of lethal force. You may not be guilty (or suspected to be guilty) of anything in the eyes of the law and face the prospect of lethal force, considering police have investigatory powers. The laws aren't the problem here (I think there are problems with the laws and penalties in other regards, but that's a separate matter), its the wide berth we give to police to enact deadly force.
>Except that the implication here is that the laws precipitate the use of lethal forc
Which they do by proxy.
Get a simple ticket and don't pay it or show up for court and it can become a bench warrant in which the cops can go arrest you. Serving warrants is a dangerous event, as in some percentage of the time the served fight back violently.
The only power police have is the power of violence.
In my country (Belgium) no one would make that association. As far as I know, there has been one policr officer killed violently on duty in the past decade, and that was in a confrontation with organized crime.
There's something weird with the culture of violence in the US.
It's about the potential for deadly interactions with police as a consequence of creating new laws for police to enforce. I think the title is slightly obtuse, but it is attention grabbing.
Sure, my point though is that it's being disingenuous to put the blame on the laws themselves for enabling these circumstances. As a society we tend to want punishment for theft, violence, etc. so it's a little absurd to say that the solution is to get rid of the laws that penalize those. A lot of people here seem to be complaining about minor infractions... some of these things have a social history and context that caused the laws to be created in the first place. Some of them, frankly, are racist or are a means of criminalizing race or innocuous behavior, and we really should be fighting to repeal those laws. But that's a discussion unrelated to the thesis here.
The problem is not per se the laws... I'd wager that most Americans favor roughly proportional response by law enforcement, and the penalties of laws usually reflect that. The blame belongs in the constitutional powers we give law enforcement to investigate crimes and respond to perceived danger. As long as the police are free to investigate suspicious persons and respond with deadly force if they feel that a person is an imminent danger, it doesn't actually matter what laws we pass.
But what is the proportional response to littering? To theft? To selling a too large coke? To braiding hair without a licence? To driving with an expired licence? To smoking pot?
In a world where offenders will readily comply with the punishment, you can just have purely civil enforcement, no need for a special class of sworn officers to deal with it.
This is the point of the essay: law enforcement gets to use physical, ultimately deadly, force, and this is the case everywhere, even if US cops are significantly more trigger-happy than pretty much all their peers.
If you're never comfortable using violence to enforce the law, there is literally no need for it to be a law. There is no point to employ police officers to check on the size of sodas if they are not allowed to initiate force to prevent people from buying and selling them.
On the contrary, if you are comfortable using violence, you have to own that anf accept that ultimately such violence will be deadly.
"But it is also true that police abuses are far more likely to victimize poor African-Americans and other politically weak groups."
-Did the author provide any evidence for this statement?
No, all theft should be illegal, otherwise that will just allow someone to abuse the system by stealing small amounts multiple times.
And no one is killing to enforce laws against petty theft, no one is killing to enforce laws against almost any infraction.
The use of deadly force comes in effect when you have a portion of the population willing to use violence against cops, which makes cops very nervous that they will 'get the winning lottery ticket' next stop and overusing force back.
This is silly. Breaking laws comes with penalties, which are determined by the courts. There is nothing that inherently states that lawbreakers must be forcibly moved to a government-controlled site; furthermore there's nothing that says people who try to resist arrest should be met with lethal force.
You have to at least establish the identity of the person you want to bring to court. This comes with the possibility that the person might resist and there you go - either you give up and let the person walk away without knowing who he was or you have to use some kind of force.
And there is no way around that - rules and laws are just words on paper, ultimately you always have to use force in one way or another if someone does not voluntarily honor the words, otherwise they will only be words on paper and nothing more.
You can penalize 'resisting arrest' in other ways than trying to arrest. You can fine them, or revoke licenses, or apply some other penalty that isn't based around jail time -- for which you'd have to actually perform the arrest.
How do you fine someone without knowing the identity? What do you do if they don't pay the fine? What if they continue doing what they are no longer allowed to do without the license?
There are certainly cases where you can punish someone without any cooperation on their side - like no longer giving them some benefits or freezing a bank account - but those scenarios are really far from covering all possible scenarios and you still have to determine the identity at the very least.
Perhaps there's nothing that says so, but nevertheless that's the system which is in place in most of the civilised world.
If you want to enforce a law (it's always an option not to enforce a given law, but then you might as well not have it) against an offender that for whatever doesn't want to cooperate with the penalty decided, what do you propose doing?
If you're resisting arrest, the penalty has not yet been decided. You're still at the phase where law enforcement wants to detain you because they suspect you of having committed a crime.
At this point, you often incur the additional criminal charge of 'resisting arrest', which can be penalized separately, which does not necessarily need to be by arresting you -- and thereby avoiding a race-condition. You could instead, for example, be subject to a court order that turns off utilities to your dwelling until you surrender to police custody, making you less likely to continue resisting. Or you could have your wages garnished, or simply staked out for days, making it difficult to go about your day. There are many creative possibilities.
Never happening in the U.S. Especially after many cases where cops have given up chase on suspects that later when to murder others.
But I do have a better idea. QUIT RESISTING ARREST. There you go. People in most other countries don't seem to have the problem with that we have in the US.
You're just pushing the problem out one level of abstraction. Why would the utility company agree to help compel a customer? Why would an employer agree to help compel an employee? Ultimately because you compel them to, under similar circumstances. If businesses will generally help punish offenders amongst their customers and employees, you don't really need law enforcement.
It's a tangent, but you also have to consider the self-employed survivalist on the ranch. No water to turn off, no employer to compel.
Absolutely agree and I find it baffling we would even be typing this. Breaking laws should not always be punishable by death even if the law you are breaking is "don't resist police authority". Sheesh. "Off with their heads!" is the punishment for everything? That doesn't seem reasonable. There are lots of laws I agree with but that I wouldn't say someone should die if they break it.
Good link thanks for finding it, I would say that 50 officers killed on purpose is even worse when compared to the other stats I linked. At face value it appears to be 5x higher.
Interestingly look at the rate of injury as well especially from fire arms.
In 2014, according to killedbypolice.net, the number of recorded killings by the police was 1111 [1], which would mean you have about _21 times_ the odds of being killed by police in a given interaction than they have of being killed by you. I haven't found any statistics on assaults from the police, so its hard to compare apples to apples there.
I'm not saying it's not more dangerous to be a police officer than the average occupation (I think it goes without saying that we expect it to be a dangerous job). But it's important to put these numbers in global terms as well. The assault rate according to those stats was 9%, with a 28.3% injury rate from assaults. To put that in perspective, assuming injury rate remains constant (which doesn't appear to be the trend, it appears to be going down), that means you have about a 39.7% chance of serving 20 years and ever receiving an injury from a criminal. For a normal occupation that would be high, but for the police that doesn't seem especially dangerous. Especially considering that about 80% of those injuries are from "Personal Weapons" (aka, getting punched).
Weather or not its an explanatory factor in a statistical sense, I don't know, but personally I can't see how that justifies some of these incidents.
>which would mean you have about twice the odds of being killed by police in a given interaction than they have of being killed by you
Why would that not be expected? They are both armed and trained. That statistic alone says nothing about the police being the perpetrators of the violence, only the party ending the violence.
Agreed, but this is the same argument you can make about police deaths. And it does say something about danger in an absolute sense (threat of death, at least). The threat of death is much higher to the person being engaged by police. Is that because of training, greater reliance on lethality, etc.? Agreed that this data isn't enough to substantiate an opinion. It's also unrelated to _perceived_ danger, which is arguably what the causal factor would be anyways. Only providing counter fodder to the appeal to police deaths as being indicative of danger of the job. If that's all we're going on, its more dangerous to be someone talking to the police.
~ the stats are much worse than that it suggests that one police officer is murdered per week and 6 are injured by a firearm (PER DAY). To suggest that those arent alarming rates and just part of the job is very ungenerous to those we trust with keeping us safe from belligerents. Imagine if it was someone in your family who was killed on duty. Sometimes "fuck the police" goes too far, some of us actually like law and order.
Out of the 1208 people killed by police last year (2015) how many where unjust? I am just wondering because, 50 in 1 million is 0.005% and 1208 in 320 million is 0.00037% so it would appear more police die per population (total police) vs per population (total people) you are 10 times more likely to die as a police officer than you are to die from a police officer.
What is your point exactly? My point is that being a police officer is not as deadly of a job as they insinuate (note that most police officers die of heart attacks and car accidents).
Incorrect WRT the injury stat. You're looking at the total stats for 10 years, not any single year.
Actually I just realized I made the same mistake for killings by police (1111 is a _one year_ count for citizens, whereas 505 is a _ten year count_ for police. In reality you had about _21 times_ the odds of being killed by the police in an interaction).
There were 1,950 firearm assaults on the police by a criminal and an injury percentage of 9.4% by firearms in 2014. That gives ~183 injuries [1].
For comparing the danger of jobs, shouldn't the metric be odds of dying in a year, not odds of dying per encounter?
Police officers will tend to have more encounters per year than the average person, so even if the odds of the office dying in a typical encounter or lower than the odds of the non-officer dying, the officer could have a much higher chance of dying over the course of a year just from having more encounters.
Agreed, they likely will. I probably wasn't clear, I wasn't making a claim about the danger to the average person, only to the danger for an average person given they have an interaction with the police vs the danger to the average police officer given an interaction w/ a person.
Odds of dying per year would still need a probability of a police encounter to multiply against. i.e. P(K | E) * P(E). For police this would just be P(E) = 1.
This is disingenuous. Few reasonable people would suggest that the police have authority to kill because someone litters, has a broken tail light, or sells single cigarettes in violation of New York law. Depending on your viewpoint and the situation, killings occur because people resist the police, because people run from the police, because the police are trigger-happy and biased, or because the police are murderers. One might even think that it is ridiculous to ban sales of single cigarettes. Even so, this piece suggests I should not support laws banning littering unless I believe the police should be authorized to kill litterers. This is ridiculous. Of course we can support a law even if we believe that a violator should not be subjected to summary execution.
Exactly. Police in other western countries are able to enforce minor infractions without killing or injuring the suspect. One can have the discussion (and should!) if these laws make sense or not, but if they are going to be enforced cops shouldn't be judge/jury/executioner. This seems to be a very American problem.
They're not acting as judge/jury/executioner, they're defending their lives. We can argue about the tiny percent of such cases where there's controversy as to whether force was used properly, but your sweeping generalization is wrong and totally unfair to people who put themselves in harms way to protect you and me everyday.
BLM talking points are not facts and presenting them as such is irresponsible.
I'm sorry but you're mistaken. 60 police officers have been killed this year already, and we're only halfway through. For many tragic reasons, the crime rate is disproportionately high in the black community, including the killing of police officers. This means that unfortunately, police have to resort to lethal force more often when confronting black people than other groups. (But don't forget that, in absolute numbers, more white people are killed by police than black people). When police officers have their life threatened, they are totally justified in using legal force.
Reaching for your gun while you're resisting arrest is ample justification for the police to shoot you.
Where there's mistakes, they should be investigated. If the evidence shows that police acted unlawfully, then they should be charged with crimes. But painting these broad strokes is dishonest and divisive. It's given rise to the false myth that police are hunting down black men en masse.
This myth has consequences. If I believed that police were hunting me and my family down due to the color of my skin, I might take some drastic actions too, and feel justified in them. But it's not true for me and it's not true for black people in America either. The vast majority of police officers who have to use deadly force in the line of duty act lawfully in defense of their lives or the lives of others.
No one argues that police are racist against whites because Asians are much less likely to be killed by cops.
Loggers, pilots, taxi drivers, refuse collectors, athletes/coaches/umpires all have rates of mortality that are higher than that of a police officer. Millions of jobs put workers at more than double the risk or even two orders of magnitude more risk than that of an officer.
For example, in 2011 and in California, the rate of mortality was 4.9 per 100k. The national average that year for all occupations was 3.5 per 100k.
Police unfortunately don't get to decide what laws to enforce. If the government decides to ban selling loose cigarettes, then police have a duty to the people to defend the laws that our democracy produces. Police are not elected legislators.
Every law ultimately rests on the police arresting you for not complying, at some point. Otherwise, the law is meaningless.
It turns out that people don't like having their freedom taken away and often fight back against the police. It's a very dangerous job.
In practice police can "turn a blind eye" - there are so many silly laws that if the police went around enforcing them all without interpretation they'd never be able to get anything done (kind of like a depth-first traversal). Generally speaking police have the freedom to pass over many misdemeanours unless they have been instructed not to.
Well it isn't as black and white as you're painting it. It is correct that sometimes law enforcement are obliged to enforce laws they as a group or as individuals do not agree with. On the other hand law enforcement are not obliged to enforce all laws all the time at any cost.
The legal principle of proportionality states that law enforcement always have to consider whether their actions are reasonable in comparison to the violation of laws.
There is also a general concept related to proportionality that basically states that law enforcement actions must be strictly necessary or required in the given situation. Especially when the means of enforcement includes physical violence.
First, since America is awash with guns I would hope the law enforcement from the top down would be the number one supporters of sensible gun control. I'm sure its hard being a cop on the street not knowing who has a gun and who doesn't.
Second, it also comes down to a training issue. I would say that the response from law enforcement that Eric Garner and Tamir Rice met was no way appropriate to the threat that they posed to law enforcement or society, perceived or otherwise. I would hope we can at least all agree that these two citizens should be alive today.
The two videos linked below are an interesting and disturbing contrast. The top one is UK police responding to a man with a knife at a Tube station. The second one is American police responding to an unarmed bank robber in Miami.
I disagree. The point is that by creating a law which you by extension are asking the police to enforce, you are inherently increasing the number of times that the police will negatively interact with people.
The cigarette tax is interesting because this exemplifies a corporate entity/state which wants to protect its revenue at the expense of a person lower on the ladder trying to address a simple market situation, it's not one that I or you deal in, but this guy obviously did.
By making it illegal, the police must enforce the law. The guy then breaking said law is faced with a hard choice when dealing with the police in that situation, which is that he is going to be at a minimum fined or possibly worse. For a cigarette, which all sane people would say, "seriously?"
Our goal should be to have police enforce laws that we care about, and laws that actually matter. It reduces the chance for potential abuse of the law. Remember that most poor people are forced to work and live in more public areas, where richer people have more private property that shields potentially the same or worse incursions of the law from the police.
The discussion of cigarette sales/taxes is clearly a strawman. If you believe that we shouldn't have laws unless we are willing to kill to enforce them, you should be able to defend this argument against a law which the vast majority of people will support. For example, I would not choose to kill someone for driving drunk, but strongly support laws which ban drunk driving and remove the ability to drive from convicted drunk drivers.
It is not the death penalty for drinking and driving that is on the table, but the possibility of the offender being killed as a result of a confrontation with the police over the act of drinking and driving. Engendering innocent lives is a serious felony and I imagine most people would support the police stopping the car with tire slashes and confronting the offender in case of further resistance, even though he might be killed (which is not the objective, but a possible consequence).
Thanks for your clear argument. I was definitely arguing 'past' the parent, and this helped me to see that. Won't hide my shame at completely missing the point.
You always need the threat, though, otherwise people can just ignore minor punishments. Why pay fines if it can't be enforced to the last consequences? Just escalate things until the other side gives up.
You are effectively, though not directly, threatening every law breaker with the possibility of being killed by a police officer.
Every lawbreaker who is willing to try to keep escalating until the other side gives up, yes. But then the problem isn't really the particular law that they first broke, it's the attitude of "you can't make your rules apply to me, and I'll fight you to the death to make sure you can't". And sometimes, it winds up literally being "to the death". But someone with that attitude, that approach to life, if it wasn't this rule that was the issue, it would be another one. So your options are "don't have any rules against ordinary stuff like trespassing, false advertising, petty theft, etc.", or "have rules but don't enforce them if the person resists", or "have rules and enforce them, even if some people wind up fighting the police after breaking that rule, and get killed for it".
I really don't think that the society with no rules against "not absolutely major" stuff would be a very good society to live in.
But then you have situations like selling loose cigarettes. Was that the fault of the rule, or was it the fault of the cop? Well, you may say, without the rule, the cop wouldn't have been in that particular interaction. True. So what would he have been doing? Interacting with someone else, with the same heavy-handedness.
It is not necessary to keep escalating things until the other side gives up in order to get killed, the possibility is always there when you allow someone (a cop) to use violence to enforce a law (which is necessary for every law), since there is no perfect system of law enforcement which always uses "the right amount" of violence. Thus, the author arguments for the reduction in the number of laws, not their extinction. I don't think there should be 'no rules against "not absolutely major" stuff'. I just think people should realize the threat that is implied in law enforcement and rethink some laws.
Fair enough. Is too much stuff illegal? Yes. (And, are there too many loopholes in existing laws? Also yes, and it gives the law an appearance of unfairness, which lowers respect for the law and increases attempts at escaping from it.)
And in fact, decriminalizing pot nation-wide might be the big step to help with a lot of this. I'm not sure it would be free from other consequences, though...
There are alternatives to allowing a situation to escalate. Firstly a well-trained police officer can manage a situation such that it doesn't escalate. Then restraint can be exercised. Admittedly these strategies are much easier in a society that isn't awash with guns.
A superior restatement of this would be "Don't support or reject any law unless you are willing to sustain the sum of all features."
Supporting some law could mean some cases interact with those of dubious mental resilience, or with unnecessarily deadly cops, which results in irrational escalation or death. It could also mean that, on the sum of all things, including people dying, society experiences net benefit.
Supporting a law which benefits nuclear energy and rejects fossil fuel or coal energy could mean people dying as well, but it could also mean a better world where fewer people die from energy policy.
Unfortunately, some people stop at the idea that an unjust death occurs, and only focus on that, without recognizing that more people may be already unjustly dying with a status quo policy. To borrow an example, people would rather a man made train barrel down its existing man made path to kill 3 people than to redirect the train to kill 1 person.
>Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.
Really seems like they are missing the obvious answer:
IF you don't want to die, don't resist police orders. Do your resistance in the courts.
In our present reality, if you try to resist the police using physical force rather than the courts, it may not matter to you if good lawyers are free. You may not make it far enough to hire one, because trying to get physical with the cops is a mind-blowingly stupid idea!Don't do it.
If you have to show up in court with a bad lawyer - or even representing yourself - do that rather than trying to fight the police.
Statistically, there's over a 90% chance you'll never see a court date. Because, see, if you don't sign this plea deal we'll just make shit up to pile into the existing charges. Maybe your day in court will let you dodge that triple life sentence, or maybe you'd rather just cop guilty and take the 90 days.
I'd like to see more coverage of the libertarian candidates this cycle. Neither major party seems likely to fix this issue -- Republicans will dismiss it and Democrats will pander and apply band-aids (all the while increasing the scope of government).
And the libertarians this time around are serious candidates -- president and VP nominees are both two-term governors. Pretty hard to ignore when the major candidates are so bad.
Gary Johnson is a neo-liberal to the core. To him everything comes down to how much it costs.
He's anti-mandatory vaccinations.
He's all about FairTax which hit the poor harder than the rich. Screw people that don't have rich parents.
He's anti net neutrality and believes incumbents should manage the network as they see fit. Of course he opposes government intervention to keep the internet "independent". Let's rely on network access providers, cause that's working out well.
He's all about the free market and anti government meddling until either argument get in his way. He says government should not subsidize or bailout industry but hey it should support building more coal (pandering to coal nation).
He supports the TPP, which is nothing but a gift to entrenched big business and the erosion of other nations sovereignty.
He's a Constitutional "originalist", which is basically code word for "screw letting people decide how to govern themselves, we're sticking to the flawed work of some long dead white guys."
In short, he's just as vague when it comes to concrete solutions, big on talking points, pro rich, anti poor, but worst of all driven by idealism versus reality.
I know many will disagree with his positions on some things, or maybe many things. The point is that they are reasonable politicians, and especially when the main candidates are so bad, deserve a fair chance in the media to have their say.
Carter correctly points out that the massive growth of
criminal and regulatory law means that almost anyone can
potentially end up in the same situation as Eric Garner.
So does Carter and author suggest reducing the number of laws? Or should we just take it that law enforcement abusing power causing deaths are inevitable?
This looks to be a variant of the point about applying infinities to human lives in public policy.
Basically, a tiny non-zero chance of death still means a finite numbers of lives killed by the policy. And any police encounter has some tiny chance of escalating to lethal force by either side.
But the obvious implication, to me, is "hey, everything has a cost in lives, that shouldn't be a dealbreaker". However, the author uses it in a way that implies that it's some useful heuristic for which laws are good, rather than a trivial point about the ever-present risk of death.
(I expected it to be a point about how, if you want to enforce any law, you have to apply increasing escalation against those who resist it. Refusal to comply -> arrest; resistance of arrest -> force; resistance of force -> death)
Resistance of force should only result in death if there is no other option; that is, if you resist it very well. In most cases, it should just result in enough force that you are no longer able to resist.
But what if they completely resisted the law to the point of shooting back? Well then it's the shooting back that will get them killed. There is a rather short list of things the police ought to be shooting at, and they all boil down to endangering life. Going on a gun rampage. Going on a knife rampage. Holding hostages.
Selling cigarettes is not on that list and the only reason that cops get away with it, is a culture of fear and egregious defensive overreaction, which treats unarmed black men as threats equivalent or worse than a white guy with a pistol drawn.
I'd want to see how the law "don't shoot after fleeing suspects unless they pose an immediate threat to others" will need deadly force to be effective. The normal way laws are enforced is by threatening to remove privileges.
In my opinion the discussion should be around the way the police force interacts with people. If some laws get abolished in the process, that's probably good.
The article is mis-titled and mis-leading, and detracts from the core principle. Any law, no matter how minor, can be escalated by a resisting citizen (or a bad cop) into a bigger, more violent situation.
After a fair reading of the article the real argument goes something like this:
1) The sheer number of laws means every citizen is in violation on a regular basis. Especially for trivial things like rolling through a stop sign, selling loose cigarettes, changing lanes without a signal, etc.
2) Every violation is an opportunity for a police encounter. A population that has only 10 laws to obey will have lower encounter rate than a population that has 1000.
3) Each police encounter has a non-zero chance of resulting in violence. Be it a citizen resisting and the cops responding with violence. Or in a cop making a fatal mistake, or a cop overreacting to a situation. There is some likelihood of a violent outcome.
4) Improved officer training and tactics alone are a limited way to lower the per-encounter violence rate. Oversight and accountability are difficult to implement due to various institutional and political barriers.
5) A better, safer, long-term solution is to reduce the total number of encounters by reducing the total number of laws a citizen is required to obey. Fewer encounters mean fewer opportunities for violence.
My main objection to this argument is that #5 would be as difficult to implement as #4. Paring down the number of laws will take a lot of political will and capital. Changing the institutions of policing and prosecution will take just as much political will to change. We should probably do both.
I think a big part of the problem is that people want to be able to break some laws (the ones that "are wrong" or "shouldn't apply to me", or just the ones that they want to), and suffer no consequences for doing so. And then, when the police try to enforce some consequences, the people feel like they (the police) shouldn't do that, are wrong to do that, and therefore they (the people) are right to try to defeat the police, either by running away or by direct attack.
There are lots of ways to enforce laws without using armed police. In the UK you have to take your car for annual inspections which covers tail lights, speeding and the like get caught by cameras, parking is covered by traffic wardens writing tickets with no guns or arrests involved, non payment of tax results in fines. Personal drug use is mostly ignored. You only really need arrests for things like theft or assault.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 209 ms ] threadSince, after all, that's the root of the problem.
[EDIT:] Are police unions, bar associations, and armaments manufacturers just going to sit out the session in which you get your miraculous "just do the right thing ok cops?" law passed? I can't believe that someone as knowledgeable as yourself really thinks that way...
Demilitarizing the police takes building a coalition for a single, focused, legislative action. Preventing all new, and eliminating all existing, legislation that you aren't willing to have the state kill to enforce requires a lot more.
So, I'd say that demilitarizing the police is a lot easier.
> Every new crime can be fought right in the legislature here and now. Who can demilitarize the police?
Demilitarizing the police can be fought right in the legislature, here and now, too.
EDIT (to respond to yours):
> [EDIT:] Are police unions, bar associations, and armaments manufacturers just going to sit out the session in which you get your miraculous "just do the right thing ok cops?" law passed?
I don't see bar associations particularly likely to oppose demilitarizing police; OTOH, police unions are often opponents of efforts to decriminalize minor offenses that are useful as pretexts (and often are sponsors of new criminalization of this type.) So, is it easier to build a coalition to beat them on one point, or thousands?
That's a popular stereotype, but -- especially in any way relevant to the kind of criminal offenses at issue in this discussion -- its not borne out at all, AFAICT, by the actual history of bar association lobbying.
Basically, the police culture seems to focus on over-policing useless things like traffic enforcement while under-policing dangerous parts of town with beat cops.
When I used to drive regularly I would often see cars with non-working lights. Most people probably aren't even aware that their light is not working. Anyone who can get the driver's attention and inform them of the problem is performing a service for everyone near roads.
As was said ad infinitum when I was learning to drive - it's a privilege and not a right.
Also seems to assume license testing is standardized with rigorous instruction regarding safety.
Some states don't require anything more than successfully completing a multiple choice test about signals and signs many folks end up ignoring anyway, and a brief on road exam.
People go in and drive safely for the 20 mins their subjected to a road test and sink into bad habits all the time.
I personally saw a wobbly 75 year old man with shakey hands (he updated his signature wearing coke bottle thick glasses) and a cane get his license renewal rubber stamped
Feeling safer already.
Not the broken taillight. It wasn't.
Not the "robbery suspect." All black men match.
Philando Castile was pulled over 52 times because police target black men with hostile situations that could get escalated to searches and small-time drug busts.
The answer is to end the Drug War and to repeal the "junk" infractions that enable police to initiate contact with minorities for no good reason.
This is a favored way of policing because it has a ton of advantages for the police and town:
1. You raise revenue. The amount raised more than offsets whatever costs you incur in enforcement. In some towns, it's the majority of their budget.
2. It allows you to screen for prior infractions. Warrants, unpaid tickets, etc. You can then take them into custody and impound the vehicle. The vehicle is extremely liquid and frequently worth quite a bit of $$$.
3. It is much safer than walking the beat in a dangerous part of town. The driver is frequently restricted within the vehicle and the officer has clear visibility into the vehicle.
4. The officer is frequently stationary in the vehicle with his laptop, internet, etc. This is much more comfortable than walking on the street or even actively patrolling in the vehicle. Why go to them, when they can come to you?
This is the problem in USA, in a nutshell. We have some amorphous mental picture of how law enforcement works, instilled by an unholy mashup of local TV news and cop movies, and we cannot abide any public innovation or experimentation in that.
Of course, in so doing, we tolerate all manner of unpublicized "innovation" on the part of LEOs: asset forfeiture, stingray surveillance, parallel construction, profiling, qualified immunity, "special-needs" exceptions, etc. So we have a ratchet in this nation, in which occasional gains in freedom on the part of particular groups are more than offset by regular losses from everyone else.
If a nonviolent suspect "runs" from law enforcement, then send her a notice of fine, in the mail. It works for the credit card companies...
But I've got pot in my trunk, or something I lifted from the local Walmart, or I'm paranoid, or I'm in a hurry, or whatever. Now what? Do they make me stop, or do they not?
Look, I'm not trying to justify profiling. But the world is not as black and white as you think it is...
Now back in actual everyday reality, can we also agree that 99.8% of the cases in which dudes are stopped and their trunks searched do not constitute violence? I mean, other than on the part of the State...
Tell me some more about what I think!
It's against the Constitution to stop people who fit the description of someone who just committed a major crime? I'd like to see you cite a paragraph of the Constitution that supports your position.
It's against common sense? I'd like to see you support that assertion as well.
> Tell me some more about what I think!
In your posts, you gave evidence that you seemed to think that using force to stop suspects was not warranted. I gave reasons why I thought sometimes it was, and therefore that your view was too simplistic - too black and white. You grudgingly acknowledged my counterexample, but got offended that I claimed your view was too black and white. You seem to think I'm ascribing to you views that you don't actually hold. But I'm not trying to read your mind. I'm just reading your words. If I'm misreading them, clarifying might be a more useful approach...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05pqskm
> Are excessive traffic fines and debtors' jails fuelling community tensions in suburban Missouri? Claire Bolderson reports on a network of ninety separate cities in St Louis County, most of which have their own courts and police forces. Critics say that their size makes them financially unviable and allege that some of them boost their incomes by fining their own citizens and locking them up when they can't pay.
It's unsafe to drive around with non-working lights, mostly because it interferes with other drivers' expectations (working brake-lights and working tail-lights, light geometry allows guesstimation of car dimensions), but also because it can impair the driver's own visibility.
But presumably these could be dealt with friendly warnings, and not a cause for fines or arrest. However, once the traffic stop is made, the officer has wide berth on how to respond, making it ultimately very subjective.
I see cars whose bodies are 75% duct-taped garbage bags on a daily basis. I hear cars with nonworking mufflers on a daily basis. Our culture is that if you don't have the cash on hand or the inclination to repair your car after a devastating crash or serious failure (but it still drives), you simply keep driving it.
I'm pretty sure the extent of "inspection" in the handful of locales where it exists is "is it throwing any emissions-related OBD codes?"
[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3681591/That-taillig...
[2] http://www.kare11.com/news/police-scanner-audio-1/267042738
[1] BOLO - "Be on the lookout"
As for the police not verifying the recording, that's not unusual. Police don't tend to comment on pending investigations unless they need something from the public. In any case, the shooter's attorney has largely confirmed the information in the recording[1]. It could still be a fake, but if it is, it's a good one based on information not publicly available until days later.
[1] http://www.startribune.com/lawyer-castile-pulled-over-becaus...
I don't see a quote from the attorney in support of the claim that the stop was called in.
If the call was already broadcast, I don't see why it couldn't be confirmed. Is this source the only one recording?
The claim that the shooter called in the stop before he made it is unremarkable because that's standard practice. In fact, it'd be more unusual if he hadn't called it in. Doubly so when stopping a suspected armed robber. A big reason why officers call in every stop is so that if the stop goes sideways and they are never heard from again, at least dispatch got the plate so investigators know where to begin.
I'd wager most news operations use Radio Reference these days rather than worry running all that gear and archiving all that audio themselves. Some of the relevant streams were down that night[1], probably explaining why there aren't other copies floating around.
[1] http://forums.radioreference.com/broadcastify-live-audio-lis...
There is really no excuse not to be doing it at this point. Especially when third parties are proven unreliable.
Most of the problems with police/citizen interaction have to do with citizens not behaving in a manner that supports the severe information asymmetries of those encounters.
[1] I don't mean they ARE predators, but that the information processing they use looks like what predators use - a detail out of place will trigger interest in further evaluation.
Non-predators behave this way as well. I think you meant to say that police operate with the logic of animals that aren't inherently afraid of their surroundings, which makes sense. Police shouldn't be afraid to investigate.
But they should have carte Blanche to poke at anything anywhere anytime they please?
Yeah no.
There should be a set of limits which they're trained in. And they should be afraid to investigate outside those limits.
Id rather tie their hands than allow a bunch of GI Joe wannabes do whatever they please.
They don't. We have really, really extensive laws (including the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution) preventing them from doing that. If they illegally search you, the evidence is useless (and often the conviction becomes impossible).
What you're describing is something out of 1984, not the reality of the hundreds of millions of police interactions in the US every year.
There are, of course, animals that are neither but they're fewer in number.
Police are "front-eyed".
It's a very common police tactic to start with a minor infraction then investigate to find any further violations. This isn't wrong, and is actually good police work. But it can be easy to abuse if applied with a racial bias, or some other prejudice. (And which is why independent police oversight is a necessity. Not just for high-profile killings, but also for monitoring how law enforcement operates in the community in small ways).
As a side note, if you're interested in this type of thing, Radiolab has just started an excellent podcast on supreme court cases called More Perfect [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Connor
[2] http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolabmoreperfect
The line between being pulled over for a minor infraction, and making an officer fear for his life is a very blurry one.
Which they do by proxy.
Get a simple ticket and don't pay it or show up for court and it can become a bench warrant in which the cops can go arrest you. Serving warrants is a dangerous event, as in some percentage of the time the served fight back violently.
The only power police have is the power of violence.
There's something weird with the culture of violence in the US.
The problem is not per se the laws... I'd wager that most Americans favor roughly proportional response by law enforcement, and the penalties of laws usually reflect that. The blame belongs in the constitutional powers we give law enforcement to investigate crimes and respond to perceived danger. As long as the police are free to investigate suspicious persons and respond with deadly force if they feel that a person is an imminent danger, it doesn't actually matter what laws we pass.
In a world where offenders will readily comply with the punishment, you can just have purely civil enforcement, no need for a special class of sworn officers to deal with it.
This is the point of the essay: law enforcement gets to use physical, ultimately deadly, force, and this is the case everywhere, even if US cops are significantly more trigger-happy than pretty much all their peers.
If you're never comfortable using violence to enforce the law, there is literally no need for it to be a law. There is no point to employ police officers to check on the size of sodas if they are not allowed to initiate force to prevent people from buying and selling them.
On the contrary, if you are comfortable using violence, you have to own that anf accept that ultimately such violence will be deadly.
And no one is killing to enforce laws against petty theft, no one is killing to enforce laws against almost any infraction.
The use of deadly force comes in effect when you have a portion of the population willing to use violence against cops, which makes cops very nervous that they will 'get the winning lottery ticket' next stop and overusing force back.
And there is no way around that - rules and laws are just words on paper, ultimately you always have to use force in one way or another if someone does not voluntarily honor the words, otherwise they will only be words on paper and nothing more.
There are certainly cases where you can punish someone without any cooperation on their side - like no longer giving them some benefits or freezing a bank account - but those scenarios are really far from covering all possible scenarios and you still have to determine the identity at the very least.
If you want to enforce a law (it's always an option not to enforce a given law, but then you might as well not have it) against an offender that for whatever doesn't want to cooperate with the penalty decided, what do you propose doing?
At this point, you often incur the additional criminal charge of 'resisting arrest', which can be penalized separately, which does not necessarily need to be by arresting you -- and thereby avoiding a race-condition. You could instead, for example, be subject to a court order that turns off utilities to your dwelling until you surrender to police custody, making you less likely to continue resisting. Or you could have your wages garnished, or simply staked out for days, making it difficult to go about your day. There are many creative possibilities.
But I do have a better idea. QUIT RESISTING ARREST. There you go. People in most other countries don't seem to have the problem with that we have in the US.
It's a tangent, but you also have to consider the self-employed survivalist on the ranch. No water to turn off, no employer to compel.
Other western countries have much lower police fatalities, being a police officer in the US is way more dangerous than other western countries.
http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.htm...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer...
http://www.npm.org.au/honour-roll
I could not find a source but it would be nice to see a break down of - killed illegally - killed by accident - injuries - gun - knives - etc
Broken down by country/per capita, I think we would find (my opinion as I couldn't find the stats) that the US is abnormally high to its peers.
Feloniously Killed: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/tables/tabl...
Accidentally Killed: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/tables/tabl...
Interestingly look at the rate of injury as well especially from fire arms.
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/tables/tabl...
I'm not saying it's not more dangerous to be a police officer than the average occupation (I think it goes without saying that we expect it to be a dangerous job). But it's important to put these numbers in global terms as well. The assault rate according to those stats was 9%, with a 28.3% injury rate from assaults. To put that in perspective, assuming injury rate remains constant (which doesn't appear to be the trend, it appears to be going down), that means you have about a 39.7% chance of serving 20 years and ever receiving an injury from a criminal. For a normal occupation that would be high, but for the police that doesn't seem especially dangerous. Especially considering that about 80% of those injuries are from "Personal Weapons" (aka, getting punched).
Weather or not its an explanatory factor in a statistical sense, I don't know, but personally I can't see how that justifies some of these incidents.
[1] http://www.killedbypolice.net/kbp2014.html
Why would that not be expected? They are both armed and trained. That statistic alone says nothing about the police being the perpetrators of the violence, only the party ending the violence.
Certainly every individual one is a tragedy, and I wouldn't want it to be me, but overall these are not alarming numbers, taken in context.
What is your point exactly? My point is that being a police officer is not as deadly of a job as they insinuate (note that most police officers die of heart attacks and car accidents).
[1] http://time.com/4326676/dangerous-jobs-america/
Actually I just realized I made the same mistake for killings by police (1111 is a _one year_ count for citizens, whereas 505 is a _ten year count_ for police. In reality you had about _21 times_ the odds of being killed by the police in an interaction).
There were 1,950 firearm assaults on the police by a criminal and an injury percentage of 9.4% by firearms in 2014. That gives ~183 injuries [1].
[1] https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/leoka/2014/tables/tabl...
Police officers will tend to have more encounters per year than the average person, so even if the odds of the office dying in a typical encounter or lower than the odds of the non-officer dying, the officer could have a much higher chance of dying over the course of a year just from having more encounters.
Odds of dying per year would still need a probability of a police encounter to multiply against. i.e. P(K | E) * P(E). For police this would just be P(E) = 1.
BLM talking points are not facts and presenting them as such is irresponsible.
Reaching for your gun while you're resisting arrest is ample justification for the police to shoot you.
Where there's mistakes, they should be investigated. If the evidence shows that police acted unlawfully, then they should be charged with crimes. But painting these broad strokes is dishonest and divisive. It's given rise to the false myth that police are hunting down black men en masse.
This myth has consequences. If I believed that police were hunting me and my family down due to the color of my skin, I might take some drastic actions too, and feel justified in them. But it's not true for me and it's not true for black people in America either. The vast majority of police officers who have to use deadly force in the line of duty act lawfully in defense of their lives or the lives of others.
No one argues that police are racist against whites because Asians are much less likely to be killed by cops.
For example, in 2011 and in California, the rate of mortality was 4.9 per 100k. The national average that year for all occupations was 3.5 per 100k.
Often, in the cases that become national controversies, in cases where the specific facts do not present a reasonable fear of imminent danger.
Police taking reasonably necessary action in defense of self or others is not particularly controversial.
Every law ultimately rests on the police arresting you for not complying, at some point. Otherwise, the law is meaningless.
It turns out that people don't like having their freedom taken away and often fight back against the police. It's a very dangerous job.
The legal principle of proportionality states that law enforcement always have to consider whether their actions are reasonable in comparison to the violation of laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportionality_(law)
There is also a general concept related to proportionality that basically states that law enforcement actions must be strictly necessary or required in the given situation. Especially when the means of enforcement includes physical violence.
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/UseOfForc...
Second, it also comes down to a training issue. I would say that the response from law enforcement that Eric Garner and Tamir Rice met was no way appropriate to the threat that they posed to law enforcement or society, perceived or otherwise. I would hope we can at least all agree that these two citizens should be alive today.
The two videos linked below are an interesting and disturbing contrast. The top one is UK police responding to a man with a knife at a Tube station. The second one is American police responding to an unarmed bank robber in Miami.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2015/dec/06/police...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1K9yY3w-WY
The cigarette tax is interesting because this exemplifies a corporate entity/state which wants to protect its revenue at the expense of a person lower on the ladder trying to address a simple market situation, it's not one that I or you deal in, but this guy obviously did.
By making it illegal, the police must enforce the law. The guy then breaking said law is faced with a hard choice when dealing with the police in that situation, which is that he is going to be at a minimum fined or possibly worse. For a cigarette, which all sane people would say, "seriously?"
Our goal should be to have police enforce laws that we care about, and laws that actually matter. It reduces the chance for potential abuse of the law. Remember that most poor people are forced to work and live in more public areas, where richer people have more private property that shields potentially the same or worse incursions of the law from the police.
I'd suggest that Eric Garner's case very explicitly proves otherwise.
"Strawman", really? Are you not aware of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Eric_Garner?
> I would not choose to kill someone for driving drunk
You have completely missed the point of OP; it's not the punishment for the crime which results in death, but the enforcement of the law.
You are effectively, though not directly, threatening every law breaker with the possibility of being killed by a police officer.
I really don't think that the society with no rules against "not absolutely major" stuff would be a very good society to live in.
But then you have situations like selling loose cigarettes. Was that the fault of the rule, or was it the fault of the cop? Well, you may say, without the rule, the cop wouldn't have been in that particular interaction. True. So what would he have been doing? Interacting with someone else, with the same heavy-handedness.
And in fact, decriminalizing pot nation-wide might be the big step to help with a lot of this. I'm not sure it would be free from other consequences, though...
Supporting some law could mean some cases interact with those of dubious mental resilience, or with unnecessarily deadly cops, which results in irrational escalation or death. It could also mean that, on the sum of all things, including people dying, society experiences net benefit.
Supporting a law which benefits nuclear energy and rejects fossil fuel or coal energy could mean people dying as well, but it could also mean a better world where fewer people die from energy policy.
Unfortunately, some people stop at the idea that an unjust death occurs, and only focus on that, without recognizing that more people may be already unjustly dying with a status quo policy. To borrow an example, people would rather a man made train barrel down its existing man made path to kill 3 people than to redirect the train to kill 1 person.
Really seems like they are missing the obvious answer:
IF you don't want to die, don't resist police orders. Do your resistance in the courts.
If you have to show up in court with a bad lawyer - or even representing yourself - do that rather than trying to fight the police.
Statistically, there's over a 90% chance you'll never see a court date. Because, see, if you don't sign this plea deal we'll just make shit up to pile into the existing charges. Maybe your day in court will let you dodge that triple life sentence, or maybe you'd rather just cop guilty and take the 90 days.
And the libertarians this time around are serious candidates -- president and VP nominees are both two-term governors. Pretty hard to ignore when the major candidates are so bad.
Gary Johnson is a neo-liberal to the core. To him everything comes down to how much it costs.
He's anti-mandatory vaccinations.
He's all about FairTax which hit the poor harder than the rich. Screw people that don't have rich parents.
He's anti net neutrality and believes incumbents should manage the network as they see fit. Of course he opposes government intervention to keep the internet "independent". Let's rely on network access providers, cause that's working out well.
He's all about the free market and anti government meddling until either argument get in his way. He says government should not subsidize or bailout industry but hey it should support building more coal (pandering to coal nation).
He supports the TPP, which is nothing but a gift to entrenched big business and the erosion of other nations sovereignty.
He's a Constitutional "originalist", which is basically code word for "screw letting people decide how to govern themselves, we're sticking to the flawed work of some long dead white guys."
In short, he's just as vague when it comes to concrete solutions, big on talking points, pro rich, anti poor, but worst of all driven by idealism versus reality.
Typical politician. Nothing new to see there.
I know many will disagree with his positions on some things, or maybe many things. The point is that they are reasonable politicians, and especially when the main candidates are so bad, deserve a fair chance in the media to have their say.
Basically, a tiny non-zero chance of death still means a finite numbers of lives killed by the policy. And any police encounter has some tiny chance of escalating to lethal force by either side.
But the obvious implication, to me, is "hey, everything has a cost in lives, that shouldn't be a dealbreaker". However, the author uses it in a way that implies that it's some useful heuristic for which laws are good, rather than a trivial point about the ever-present risk of death.
(I expected it to be a point about how, if you want to enforce any law, you have to apply increasing escalation against those who resist it. Refusal to comply -> arrest; resistance of arrest -> force; resistance of force -> death)
Selling cigarettes is not on that list and the only reason that cops get away with it, is a culture of fear and egregious defensive overreaction, which treats unarmed black men as threats equivalent or worse than a white guy with a pistol drawn.
In my opinion the discussion should be around the way the police force interacts with people. If some laws get abolished in the process, that's probably good.
After a fair reading of the article the real argument goes something like this:
1) The sheer number of laws means every citizen is in violation on a regular basis. Especially for trivial things like rolling through a stop sign, selling loose cigarettes, changing lanes without a signal, etc.
2) Every violation is an opportunity for a police encounter. A population that has only 10 laws to obey will have lower encounter rate than a population that has 1000.
3) Each police encounter has a non-zero chance of resulting in violence. Be it a citizen resisting and the cops responding with violence. Or in a cop making a fatal mistake, or a cop overreacting to a situation. There is some likelihood of a violent outcome.
4) Improved officer training and tactics alone are a limited way to lower the per-encounter violence rate. Oversight and accountability are difficult to implement due to various institutional and political barriers.
5) A better, safer, long-term solution is to reduce the total number of encounters by reducing the total number of laws a citizen is required to obey. Fewer encounters mean fewer opportunities for violence.
My main objection to this argument is that #5 would be as difficult to implement as #4. Paring down the number of laws will take a lot of political will and capital. Changing the institutions of policing and prosecution will take just as much political will to change. We should probably do both.