Quote:
Originally Posted by Oling_Roachinen
a person got killed because of some insane laws that allow no-knock warrants to be executed by plain clothes police at night because some overzealous police force is afraid some drugs might be flushed down the toilet by an affiliate of a drug dealer. All in the name of the war on drugs.
Instead a lot of people are at a loss how police can go to the wrong house and shoot a person in her bed and not face murder charges.
If people don't understand why this will possibly go down as a legal killing, these people aren't going to be fighting for the right laws to get changed because right now we can all but guarantee this will happen again in some other jurisdiction, sadly.
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Well said.
I also feel the discussion is mostly missing a significant issue of the US legal system.
In Europe you can't kill someone just in case they might do something, in the US you can.
It's not just cops. There's been plenty of
civilian cases where completely harmless people got shot by someone who thought they
might be a threat.
This is really the issue on many of these cases, and really I think a major reason why it's so disproportionately black men who get killed. It's not that cops go out to hunt black guys, at least not mostly. They just imagine dangerous things might happen because "black men are dangerous" and react to those imaginary/hypothetical threats with deadly force.
The idea that you can respond with deadly force to something
before it has actually happened is completely insane, yet something many Americans keep arguing is somehow okay. It's much of what this discussion has been about in some ways: "how likely was it that the latest person shot might have done something bad if he hadn't been shot". Was someone a criminal,.were they doing something suspicious or something normal, etc. Was it reasonable to think a guy going into the car was going to do something dangerous.
None of that should matter. In countries with a reasonable legal system, you can't kill someone because you think they might do something. You have to wait until they actually try to do it, or actually do it.
This is really the issue. Most of these shootings are based on hypotheticals. If you react to something
possibly happening with deadly force, of course you're going to kill a hell of a lot more people than if you always waited for something to actually happen.
That's also why most of these cops aren't convicted. It's not just a policing issue, although it's also that.
It's that Americans for some reason have decided that pre-emptive killings are not murder.
That's what needs to change, and that would require a culture change.
(I do think that the culture change should start with the police, as you could actually train them to not kill people just because it would be legal.)