It's Unconstitutional for the Police to Kill People

[Rev. Rye]

Nobody seems to realize that when the police shoot a person, the police is acting as judge, jury and executioner, depriving the person of life without due process of law.

Due process of law is supposed to consist of a trial and conviction by jury.

The police know they can’t charge a person with having a gun in a state where it’s legal to carry a gun.  By killing the person they are not doing their job of enforcing the law. They are deciding that the law will not suffice.

They don't claim to execute people in the name of the law.  The claim is self defence.  That's if there is a claim, some officers just say they don't know why they did it and so on, I mean there's lots of situations but I don't think many claim to be doing it in the name of the law as part of an execution.

My sentiments exactly, except there's one crucial point: they tend to have a remarkably lenient definition of self-defense.

You see, what to do about instances of people getting shot by the police, especially when the victims aren't actually a threat is extremely complicated.

I can remember watching a film a while back called Over the Edge. It's a damn fine film, but one crucial plot point has a local police officer killing a local youth (played by Matt Dillon in his first role) who pointed an unloaded pistol at him. Needless to say, this is roundly condemned, although he does raise a good point: there is no way he could tell for sure that the gun wasn't loaded unless he examined it himself [and even then, there's always a possibility that he could have missed something]. The fact that something like that is inevitable.

Of course, from a sufficient distance (and presumably with a combination of experience and a somewhat deranged mind), virtually anything can be mistaken for a gun, and in such circumstances, potentially lethal force can seem like potential self-defense. And given that, to police who are likely to have to deal with a lot of criminals, especially with a disporportionately high number of poor black people, virtually anything they do can be seen as threatening (even/especially if it's not), and, if something bad happens, well, I've never heard of a cop getting anything worse than a firing from any violence they commit on the job.

However, that said, if that is taken away from them, it can be extremely difficult to do their job well, if, for instance, some Charles Whitman-type is actually causing problems and the only thing to do is take him out. Fun fact: in countries like the UK (except in Northern Ireland), the vast majority of police officers don't carry guns. Can you imagine a policy like this working in America?

So, basically, we have so many factors: a right to self-defense on the cops' part, an alarmingly lenient interpretation of that same right on the judges' (and cops') part, life-or-death situations being far more difficult to distinguish from harmless experiences than one might have expected, institutional racism meaning enough minorities are still criminals that even the law-abiding ones get punished for it for being caught doing things as innocuous as holding a toy train, and countries like America being such a fountain of lunacy that we simply cannot count on police to do their jobs to the best of their abilities if they don't reserve the right to kill anyone they see (or at least can spin) as a threat to themselves.

Is it any wonder why three years after the founding of Black Lives Matter, and almost five after the shooting of Trayvon Martin, there still hasn't any  actual progress in this area?