UPDATE:
Chuck made some excellent points, as usual, in the comments. I am responding there, but I thought I should clarify at the top of this post something I’d wanted to emphasize below, but didn’t.
That is, what I’m really upset about is not the attitudes, reactions, or intent of individual cops. Cop-bashing results from making sweeping generalizations about police attitudes, and I’m certainly guilty of it in the post below. Chuck’s right that it’s not productive or fair. What’s more important is that it misses the point, which is that the problem is really situational:
1) Police officers are trained (correctly in my view) that persons brandishing knives within 21 feet or less, or firearms at greater distances, can pose a mortal threat; they are also trained that they are legally justified in defending themselves with deadly force if they are faced with such a mortal threat.
(Whether they are trained to understand that any armed citizen is ALSO legally justified in defending themselves with deadly force against a similar mortal threat, I do not know. Nor do I think it would matter, because:)
2) Police officers are also trained that officer protection is paramount if they want to go home to their families at the end of their shifts. The result is:
3) When faced with a potential threat, and the need to classify it in a split second as mortal or not, officers have a quite rational impetus, based on the above, to err on the side of perceiving a mortal threat — because if they err to the other side, they may not go home that night. (I have always thought this alone explained the rash of “puppycides” — dogs in a home that are demonstrably not presenting a threat still get shot by cops as a matter of routine. The thought process, I suppose, would be that dogs are fast fast fast, and if Officer Friendly doesn’t terminate the potential threat of Rover, he might not go home, etc.)
4) Because 99.9% of the folks police interact with are, frankly, criminal scumbags, and the cops know this quite well, there is I am sure a quite rational presumption by most officers that most of the people they encounter with guns are committing a crime simply by possessing them. And if Officer Friendly shoots Joe Felon, and Joe was (truthfully) scum, odds are there will be plenty of legitimate evidence on hand that Joe Felon was in fact engaged in some sort of crime, and thus NOT LEGALLY JUSTIFIED IN RESISTING Officer Friendly. (Also, that sort of evidence makes for a very strong immunity from prosecution and expectation of a winning defense by the department’s legal counsel in the event of a civil suit.)
5) Unfortunately, all of this causes significant problems in situations when points 1-4 collide with an armed citizen — whether a CCW holder walking out of a store, or a homeowner trying to defend himself against a home invasion.
Note that the above analysis excludes consideration of individual officers’ attitudes, reactions or overreactions to less than total obedience on the part of a citizen — the starting point for most cop-bashing exercises. It’s not even necessary to bring that into the discussion to see that this situation promotes the death of armed citizens at the hands of police — accidentally or not. How to prevent these deaths? I do not know.
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ORIGINAL POST BELOW:
I never thought I’d see the Z retract a post. Especially this one.
in the instance of a raid at a mistaken address, where a police officer is killed by an armed citizen, then a parade should be held for that citizen. If a police officer kills a citizen at a mistaken address raid, or while executing a warrant-less search, or a search like the one in Arizona that cost a young Marine combat veteran who had committed no crime, had no criminal history, was a decorated veteran, family man and hard-working employee his life–because the police lacked the most basic firearms discipline, had a negligent discharge, and responded to their own weapon going off by firing 70 rounds–and killing a Marine who had committed no crime.
That’s a really long run-on sentence to say this: Every cop who raided that house should be put on trial for murder. Plain and simple. They violated his rights, they raided his home, and their own ineptitude caused his death–all by actions which they initiated.
[Strikeout in the original, now that Chuck retracted that post.] Chuck’s right about lots of things, wrong about few. He was wrong to retract, IMO.
This made sense. (“Felony murder rule for me? Then felony murder rule for thee, too.”) I like and respect police officers for the work they do. However, I’ve seen enough police misbehavior — such as this, caught on their own video cameras, no less — that’s so utterly blatant in its disrespect of citizens’ lives and property, its presumption that citizens are subjects of police whim, that it frankly doesn’t matter if, as Chuck says in his new post,
…most police, and I am sure even the ones led by sheriff dupnik, thought they were doing the right thing. They thought they were protecting us. At some level there was a fuckup of collossal proportions, but at the end-user level, where the rubber meets the road, there were just a group of police trying to do their jobs.
Essentially, he’s saying, it’s tough out there, and humans make mistakes; we should give our heroic warriors the benefit of the doubt and presume they acted lawfully, even in tragedies like this. Here’s the problem: That doesn’t matter. These weren’t bad cops. These cops likely did everything lawfully. Their intentions don’t matter. The situation is the problem. The situation is that there will in all likelihood be no justice for the widow or her child, or the dead Marine. There may be financial compensation, paid from the city’s insurance, but there will be no criminal prosecution of the officers, and that’s the problem. Why do so many people instinctively echo Chuck’s now-retracted words above? Because there’s no just remedy. They should be tried for murder, but they won’t.
As for the rest of it, Chuck makes a great — on its face — parallel to the Haditha marines (go read it) — and points out one of his own near-shootings in-country of a kid who foolishly grabbed at his rifle. There but for the grace of God goes Chuck, etc. Hey, I’ve been through a wrongful shooting myself. I know how fast a mistake can turn fatal. But there are three big logical flaws here.
The first is the failure to note that there’s no need to “presume” the cops acted lawfully; the anger out there comes from the reality that by definition they acted “lawfully.” I’m sure the shooter(s) will say they felt threatened by the sight of the Marine with his AR; I’m sure that’s a true statement — who wouldn’t be frightened? — but under current law, that means they were legally justified in wrongfully killing him, defending themselves against a threat. They were on a raid; they had a warrant; they will all say they “knocked and announced,” and it doesn’t matter that the Marine would also have been legally justified in defending himself and his wife and child because he didn’t hear that knock-and-announce. He’s dead, and they will get away with no significant punishment for their lawful but horrific misdeed, because they were legally justified in killing him for defending himself against them. That’s the law, and we’re all fucked because of it.
The second logical flaw is the concept that just because cops are in ultra-high-stress situations on raids, gosh darn it, they require the benefit of the doubt when something goes wrong. Bullshit. That idea might have had merit before the militarization of our police forces, with the attendant adoption of “officer protection” as the most important factor in any situation, such that every situation now requires overwhelming force be directed against the citizen, whether or not he’s in the right. Under these circumstances, cops absolutely do NOT deserve the benefit of the doubt if they fuck up. They’ve weighted everything so much in their favor that fucking up in this sort of raid situation (i.e., killing an innocent civvie “by mistake”) should theoretically be impossible.
But the most critical and important logical flaw in Chuck’s recantation is the absurdity of the parallel between high-stress warriors on the battlefield and police officers engaged in domestic raids. The laws of war don’t apply here at home. Even though 99.9% of the people cops come into contact with are the scum of the earth, if that means cops have come presume they can do whatever they want to whoever they encounter who has the temerity to resist — because the cops presume they’re criminals — then the rest of us, as I said, are fucked.
I am friendly with any cop I meet, but in my fifteen years as a lawyer, and from discussions with prosecutors, civil attorneys, and cops, I believe three things about the majority of cops:
1) They do not know the law. They know enough law to make a credible justification to cite somebody for a violation, or justify their own actions, but that’s generally the extent of their knowledge.
2) Cops will stubbornly stick to what they think the law is, even if you’re showing them the clause proving them wrong in their own statute book, and will write you up regardless of being completely wrong. (Aside: Cops are bullies on this point. On one occasions I presented myself at the station to earnestly and reasonably talk to an officer about why his contention that I failed to follow the law was completely incorrect, I was startled to notice the guy’s hands trembling as we sat down to go over the statute. At five-eight and doughy in my middle years, I’m not an intimidating guy, I don’t think — but here was a six-foot officer, easily double my weight, terrified by the prospect of a non-scumbag attorney firmly and politely challenging him. He’d probably guessed the prosecutor would never prosecute me, and once it was clear I knew that too, he didn’t know what to do next except robotically stick to his guns. The Blue Line is always in effect, even if it’s a line one cop long.)
3) The Blue Line is real. One of Chuck’s commenters mentions his belief in it, and Chuck’s retort is, in essence, so on that point you think all cops are liars? Fifteen years’ experience in the legal system here, and plenty of discussions with cops, and I will say yes, they are, when it comes to this sort of situation. The exceptions are so rare as to astonish.
Add up those three factors, put them into a home invasion — oh, sorry, I mean warranted raid — and I think you can see why in my mind Chuck’s first blog post was the right one. Lawsuits don’t work to change minds. I am an officer of the court, and I have no hesitation in saying the system is so completely broken that cops will almost never face justice for this sort of misdeed. As for the larger picture, civilian authorities who try to change police procedure run into the Blue Line in different form. As a citizenry, the only option we have left is to impotently jeer.
Sorry they got to you, Chuck.
