HMM: DA won’t say whether charges are being considered for officers who killed Stephon Clark. … "Plus, The Police Shooting of Stephon Clark Is Deeply Problematic. I don’t know whether the shooting was justified, though it looks very much like it wasn’t. But I do know that if an armed citizen, rather than a police officer, had shot someone under similar circumstances, there wouldn’t be any doubt about filing charges. I understand that sometimes the decision to shoot is easy to second-guess, but the standard should be the same — in theory, the law is the same — whether it’s a police officer or a civilian doing the shooting. In fact, of course, police get special treatment, because they’re an arm of the state, just like the judges and prosecutors involved are." More below. The article above (second article) is excellent. You should read the whole thing.
"I consistently see videos and reports of police opening fire in circumstances that are more reminiscent of the conduct of troops on patrol, or — even more disturbingly — less restrained than troops on patrol. It is the job of the person in uniform not to think in terms of theoretical danger and legal justification but rather to keep in mind probabilities and perspective. What is the larger mission? What are the alternative courses of action that can accomplish that mission without escalating to deadly force? What is the degree of risk I should tolerate to execute that mission? I fear that by constantly asking whether cops should go to jail, too many members of the public and too many policymakers aren’t asking the hard questions about police mindsets, actions, and training “left of boom,” before the shooting starts. In the military, we often spoke of the difference between the law of armed conflict and the rules of engagement. The law of armed conflict established the minimum legal standards for the use of force. The rules of engagement are those standards specifically tailored for the strategic and tactical situation on the battlefield. They constantly shift as risks and challenges evolve. To carry forward the analogy: Cops don’t have a law-of-armed-conflict problem — the constitutional standards and state statutes governing when a cop can be prosecuted are appropriate — they have a rules-of-engagement problem. Training and escalation-of-force standards are too often not matched to the level of threat that police officers actually face or to the overarching mission of an American police force. And that mismatch inevitably leads to tragedy — tragedies where cops don’t break the law but a man dies, a family mourns, and a community fractures. It’s time to change the rules." This gets to my primary beef with local police, how they dress. Increasingly, I see officers or deputies who are attempting to make policing into a paramilitary job. They wear black fatigues, with load bearing vests filled with military- and paramilitary-like gear. These police/deputies do not look like civilian policing forces; they look like a military force. This creates mindset problems, both in the civilians and in the police. I agree wholeheartedly that police today have a rules-of-engagement problem. Not all situations need to be reduced immediately. Most allow the police to back off, and reduce the pressure to shoot the suspect. We need to change the rules and some of those changes need to alter police uniforms to look like police uniforms, not military uniforms. I do slightly disagree with the author in one regard. After watching the helicopter video, I am struck at how many times the officers continue to fire after Clark is on the ground and not moving. I saw a briefing from the private coroner on where Clark was shot, and it is clear that he was shot in the right side and back after he fell to the ground and the "threat" stopped. I realize the "threat" was nonexistent but still, once Clark stops moving, the threat ends and the police continue to fire. Notice in the helicopter video that bullet strikes continue to hit the concrete long after Clark is down. This is when he likely took the fatal shots. Police and civilians should not have different rules-of-engagement. They may need different rules about when they can draw a weapon during a foot chase, etc., but there should be no difference in what constitutes self-defense, or what constitutes an end-of-threat. The police, in this case, fired long after the end-of-threat. Any citizen who was shooting in self-defense who shot this many times after the end-of-threat would likely face criminal charges. Police should have to meet these same requirements.
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