redwing42
Well-known member
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- Mar 16, 2011
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There are a lot of ways to respond to this post. I'll save commentary on your views of how the background self-defense rules are inequitable and unfair for another day. But I will say this: It's a pretty messed up view to expect police officers to protect and serve--and thus be the touchpoint between civil society and the violence inherent in lawless criminality--yet think they should perform their duties hamstrung by special rules that require them--and only them--to disengage in the face of an imminent threat to their life or the life of another. And you complain about a power imbalance? Well, thank God there is one! But at the end of the day, police officers are just people, and they just want to make it home to dinner like anyone else. If anything, considering their role and importance to life as we know it, we should give them more leeway to make split-second decisions in life-threatening situations than average citizens, not less.
Perhaps if they were trained as if they were going to "protect and serve" the community, instead of being trained as if they were going out to war, fewer of them would be so concerned about "making it home to dinner." Being a police officer is a very difficult job, I won't deny it. But going into every situation as if the other person is the enemy is going to lead to problems. Since police are given the ability to use lethal force and determine when to do so, they should also be held to a greater level of responsibility with that ability. There is not a way to reverse dead. If an officer makes a mistake in killing a person, there is no way to take it back. It should only be done in the most dire of situations.
Also, while most of the argument here is focused on those killed by police, the bigger issue is really the systemic use of police to keep power and wealth within a limited group. That certainly affects more than just the few thousand that have been killed (and their families). That is a harder argument to quantify, though, which is why people try to fall back on other arguments with quantifiable numbers (of a sort, at least).