> Taylor's death has ignited a firestorm across the nation in recent weeks, as prominent activists and politicians questioned why an unarmed black woman had been gunned down by white officers
The whole police immunity for murder and violence needs to stop. If a civilian did something similar even if under worse conditions they would be treated horribly by the cops and be put to jail under shitty conditions for years. A policeman can easily say "I was worried for my life!" when shooting an unarmed person but a civilians can't say the same thing if they shoot a cop that invaded their house, or even another civilian.
Don't forget the doctrine of "qualified immunity". Police officers/departments carrying out their official duties can only be sued for violations of "clearly established" law. Seems maybe reasonable in theory, but in practice means that even if they do something obviously, blatantly illegal, they can avoid consequences if they can argue that the specific set of factual circumstances had not previously been judged to be a Constitutional violation.
The plaintiffs allege that, while executing a search warrant, Fresno police officers personally stole several hundred thousand dollars worth of coins. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided that even if this theft happened, the officers could not be sued:
> We recognize that the allegation of any theft by police officers—most certainly the theft of over $225,000—is deeply disturbing. Whether that conduct violates the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures, however, would not “be ‘clear to a reasonable officer.’” [...] Because Appellants did not have a clearly established Fourth or Fourteenth Amendment right to be free from the theft of property seized pursuant to a warrant, the City Officers are entitled to qualified immunity.
Yesterday the Supreme Court declined to consider the plaintiffs' appeal, which means they're SOL.
That is the right decision...the officers should not be sued for the alleged theft because they were seizing property pursuant to a warrant.
The police department or city should be sued for it, if the warrant were unlawfully obtainedor if items seized during the search allegedly went missing. And they were sued.
The ruling you are complaining about was specifically about removing the officers as individual defendants from the civil case. The city of Fresno is still a defendant in the case. It is simply the individual officers that are not.
On another note--the difference in values in that case is due to how the police recorded the coins into evidence. When physical money is taken into evidence, they record the stated value of the money (i.e., a quarter is recorded as a quarter...even if it is a rare quarter worth $1million on the collectibles market, since it's not the police's job to get an appraisal for items taken into evidence). The plaintiffs valued the collectibles at their alleged market values.
Wow. Yeah IDK who thought police being able to murder and steal without punishment was a good idea, but it seems antithetical to the notion of a free society.
A few months after the Charleston massacre, several white nationalist groups held a confederate flag rally at Stone Mountain, a monument to the confederacy and the birthplace of the second KKK. Police were there to keep the rally and protestors separate and as tensions flared, dude reached for his gun:
> The whole police immunity for murder and violence needs to stop.
The punishment for crimes committed by police officers should be harsher than the punishment for the same crimes committed by regular citizens. And the law should be actually enforced, not conveniently ignored. It would probably only take a few high profile cases where they make an example of the officer to change the attitude in the police force.
Right now, some police, who are meant to protect, are trigger happy because they know that their colleagues "have the backs," and they will be let off the hook with a suspension in the worst case. They don't analyze a situation carefully enough before reaching for their guns. There are shortcuts taken far too often by police, such as entering properties without warrants, arresting people who have not committed or are even suspected of committing crimes. The police think they're a different tier of citizen, and well, they are, because they can violate citizen's rights with almost immunity.
It is understandable that mistakes can be made, but it this is precisely why they need to be made an example of, to prevent the mistakes recurring.
The system that exists is unequal protection. The police are protected by a culture of the State looking after itself and its public servants. There is supposed to be an independent body which investigates police crimes, but the two are hand in hand in letting their men off the hook.
This is also a slippery slope in the other direction. If they know they are essentially immune, then their limiters are removed in their behavior - making them more likely to be negligent and cause accidents, which in turn, they get let off for, strengthening the idea that police are mostly immune from prosecution.
One could argue that a police officer could voluntarily give up their "equal protection" right as a pledge for entering the force. If they are committed to serving and protecting, then such declaration could give confidence to those are meant to be being served. Right now, almost everyone is sceptical of the police in one way or another. The system is rigged and it stinks.
I agree except your 3rd paragraph, because I dont think that would have the intended result. It breaks the findamental concept.
I read your comment as agreeing with Equal Protection. In the end we are talking about the penality for framing or depervation of rights under the color of law. It should apply to everyone. It's easy to point out the problem, but proposing a slution is much harder. Juries are the real firewall, but they depend on the knowledgebase of the jurors.
It's one of these things that a direct "of x then y" prob isnt going to work. Giving the public direct access to lower level raw information is what I would like to start with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23232250
Imagine if we could script Pacer stats....
EDIT: hit my comment limit for the night, good point about the DA; in that case, it's the next level up from juries; the electorate. The DA is only accountable to them if they make them so, and public opinion does not always wait until the next election, bad PR is fixed astonishingly quickly if the DA's boss feels the pressure. If you have another idea, please propose it.
It doesn't feel right for me to comment about an account in response to someone else's post. Maybe I'll say a general thing instead:
We rate limit accounts when they post too many low-quality comments too quickly and/or get involved in flamewars—and we're happy to remove the rate limit when people commit to following the site guidelines in the future. hn@ycombinator.com is the best place to contact about this.
HN is a moderated site. Whether that's censorship or not is mostly a word game; people use that word when they don't like a thing and different words when they do.
I have always found that it is helpful to put up sign outside your house that you are a gun owner or perhaps even an NRA sticker (even if you abhor guns and NRA). As a person of color living in an area which had too many people who would deliberately pickup fights with me (especially related to parking) all that ended once I put up a big NRA logo on my car. I do not even own a gun.
And if you dislike the NRA, you can always rep an SRA sticker instead. Although it's probably less recognizable and the "S" in SRA may bring some issues.
>A policeman can easily say "I was worried for my life!" when shooting an unarmed person but a civilians can't say the same thing if they shoot a cop that invaded their house, or even another civilian.
Isn't that what stand-your-ground law enable people to do?
See this very case! Taylor's boyfriend, Kenneth Walker, fired at police officers breaking into his girlfriend's house; he was arrested and charged with attempted murder, and is currently under house arrest. The police union, of course, is screaming bloody murder that this "threat to the men and women of law enforcement" is even in house arrest, rather than in a facility. (https://twitter.com/KYFOP614/status/1243557106487361536)
We'll see what happens after the case works its way through court, but he's already losing several months of wages and the stress of a court battle, which is more than most cops have to go through after shooting someone.
Unfortunately, while it appears the law is on his side based on the facts currently known (Kentucky is a castle doctrine and SYG state), these doctrines are affirmative defenses that must be argued in court. Under most state criminal procedure codes, Mr. Walker can be held until trial (unless freed on bail, or placed under house arrest).
Note that placing someone under house arrest in a conservative state like Kentucky is the judge's way of saying that he expects the defendant to prevail in court and thus won't subject them to the indignities of the prison system, but can't simply release them without bail or restriction due to the nature of the charges.
Yes, if a cop invades your home without following proper procedure (i.e., by announcing "this is the police" or by wearing police uniform), in a state with castle doctrine you can shoot trespassers without attempting to flee.
Both the castle doctrine and stand-your-ground doctrines let people shoot attackers without attempting to flee. One of the big differences is that castle doctrine only applies in your home (but is a very strong defense that is generally acceptable in almost every state), while stand-your-grand would apply outside your home, but is more limited--not every state allows for a stand-your-ground defense. For example, California allows for the castle doctrine but not stand-your-ground, so you would have to reasonably attempt to flee before engaging in deadly force.
That's what they are supposed to do - but these aren't things that are applied fairly.
Not so long ago, there was a woman arrested for firing a warning shot at her abusive spouse or boyfriend. She was jailed. Unsurprisingly, she was African-American. Women, in general, can't use this defense as often and minorities rarely can.
And few folks can use this against cops - you'd need someone to come to your aid and prove the cop did something wrong.
You left out the most important fact of the Marissa Alexander case: she left the room in which the confrontation was occurring, went to the attached garage, retrieved her handgun from her car, and then went back. There's also a question of whether it was a "warning shot" as she claims, or just bad marksmanship in trying to kill her husband, the facts strongly support the latter, and that's generally something for a jury to decide. Warning shots are also very strongly frowned upon for reasons that should be obvious.
So Florida's stand your ground law provision had absolutely nothing to do with the case. Plus there's one now pretty old study out there that shows in Florida that blacks successfully used the stand your ground provision of Florida law as part of a self-defense affirmative defense more often than whites. The claim that women are disfavored in claiming self-defense is literally something I've never heard of.
I imagine it would be seen as having left (given up your ground) and then returned thereby entering the other person's ground. I'm pretty sure even without stand yiur ground if you are in an altercation, leave, and return, it's seen as you are now the aggressor.
I've seen this happen with fights without weapons involved (both in real life and shows like Live PD), and the charges are always serious if they left and came back, most especially with a weapon.
Sounds like a good idea if you don't mind partnering every officer with a paralegal to ensure it's okay to discharge their weapon. Otherwise, no sane person would be a police officer.
A private citizen enjoys the right to self-defense, and in cases where killing the assailant is the only means to end the fight and preserve one's life, that is generally held as justifiable. Law enforcement officers enjoy the same right.
There are internal investigations every time a police officer discharges their weapon. They don't enjoy immunity against any crime they commit. If there is no evidence of a crime, then there cannot be any criminal charges.
You are correct, except you skipped over the critical "entering a domicile without a Constutional reason" part. There is no way for the occupant to know it's lawful or even the police.
If it's done because of a immediate threat to life situation, then the people involved are rightfully risking their lives, to save another, and they know that.
If it's done to prevent the flushing of evidence down a toilent, then that's a bad trade for everyone, and the Senator from Kentuckey is right.
Why aren't there easily available statistics for this well-defined social function? I can get medical malpractice statistics very easily, why not law enforcement malpractice?
Police is complicit but you have to go up a couple more pay grades up in order to get to the root cause. Who introduced such measure and who is perpetuating it and why?
I feel like, in general, in most countries around the world, the police are bad people and not trustworthy. I have little respect for the police, and usually abide by a personal policy of avoiding them, and refusing to cooperate whenever possible.
In my one run-in with the police in the bay area, after I was mugged at gunpoint and called the police immediately after, they were entirely unreliable and unhelpful. They refused to go after the perpetrators despite having a clear opportunity to at the time.
In many countries, the police is corrupt, harassing civilians to extort them into giving bribes. In Indonesia, planting drugs during a stop to extort money out of tourists is a well known scam. A drivers license check is never passed without a bribe (amounting to the entire contents of your wallet).
In Hong Kong, where I live now, the police has a history of brutally repressing peaceful protests, including the shooting of unarmed civilians, and the cover-up of multiple rapes and murders perpetrated by policemen.
Oftentimes, even when they are not outrightly criminal, the police is there to enforce awful laws that infringe on people's basic human rights.
I live in Germany and in 2015 our police, for the whole year, in the whole country only fired 88 bullets. Germans go through 3 years of training and have a lot of training on non-violent/lethal deescalation.
I also used to live in the US, and the cops there are nuts.
Curious you went all the way back to 2015. Why not go further back to 1940? German police weren't looking too good then. We can all cherry pick data, but often what's left out says more.
We Germans aren't perfect either, not a single cop got prosecuted for the police violence at G20, and we routinely get scandals for Nazi cops or a lack of accountability...
> I feel like, in general, in most countries around the world, the police are bad people and not trustworthy.
In every country. All police exist to protect the state by maintaining order. They do not exist to serve or protect you. Quite the opposite. This is true everywhere, including "paradises" like sweden or norway.
The police is there to "protect and serve" just like google is there to "do no evil".
Sure, but in some countries they are more sadistic and triggerhappy than in other countries. Seems that some cultures have more of the 'uniform is power' mental defect. The Dutch police you can practically spit on and they won't lose their cool; in Spain you will be beaten to a pulp for that. I prefer the Dutch way, a lot. No need for aggressive angry hot-heads in uniforms with sticks, tasers and guns.
I have some experience with the police force and I think the problem may run deeper and be a bit less dramatic, and I think this might be true nationwide. The gist is that benefits and compensation for police officers have been going down in recent years. Lower pay, worse insurance, no retirement; all of these things lead to less, and less qualified, applicants. This drives down the employment requirements and removes the older, more level-headed officers.
In the past they required a college degree; now it's just a high school diploma or GED. In the past they provided plenty of training (ie. time on the range; de-escalation procedures, etc.); now you get 12 bullets twice a year for certification. In the past you received a good pension and great insurance; now if you die on the job your family gets nothing.
Who in the world would WANT to be a police officer in this situation!? You get little pay, little respect, and you have to run into the problem while everyone else runs away.
This is in no way an excuse for what happened in my town (Louisville, KY) but I thought it might shed some light as to why it happened. I don't think cops are bad people and it only takes a few to really drag them all down. They are generally just people trying to go to work and make a living. The vast, vast majority of police officers don't wake up wanting to end someone's life. They just want to make their town a bit safer and stay alive to spend time with their families.
It's funny; while reading the first part of what you wrote, I came to a completely different conclusion than you. Given that pay, benefits, and training are so bad, my feeling is that you get fewer good people who want a good job, and more people who want to be able to legally wave a gun around and exercise power over others, with little accountability.
It's a viscous cycle, more bad police equals more criminal behavior leads to desire to hire more police. It can be difficult to decide between quality vs quantity. Put a bunch of people walking the streets in blue, make people feel safer; those people then create situations and exacerbate tensions in communities because they are under-trained or untrainable, makes people people avoid interactions with police, creating a power vacuum more readily filled by gangs.
I almost agree that most cops are potentially not bad cops, except that most of them participate in the blue wall of silence and covers for the bad cops. That makes all of them complicit and the whole system corrupt.
With all the lockdown / home-schooling, my (probably misplaced) hope would be that teaching, as a career, is given more respect and the earning capacity that goes with the recognition of how important teaching is to the general functioning of society.
Teachers raise our kids for fucks sake. Knuckleheads, and there are plenty, will bring them down, and that affects the whole of society for a long time. Attracting better quality teachers raises all boats.
But then Nursing, that also needs more respect for the shit, often literally, they face day in day out.
Police, fuck, if you can't trust them to do the right thing, then what's the fucking point in the first place?. Get the right people, and the people right.
Paying peanuts gets monkeys, and monkeys throw shit everywhere. I'm overpaid for what I do and it's effect on society. I'm hoping that the pandemic will cause at least somewhat of an adjustment, but my world-wise cynicism leans towards further adjustment in the wrong direction.
I appreciate Mr. Paul's sentiment and agree with him. I would like to see him go further though and end the drug war that the US gov has waged against the American people. I think these no-knock warrants and other systemic, organized violence committed by a militarized civilian law enforcement is largely enabled by this war.
Why not just issue a warrant to drill a hole for a camera, or use other tech to passively see through walls?
Guess that takes away the fun of brute force entry and trigger happy law enforcement that needs to put their training to use.
There is precedent for a similar idea that worked well in criminal investigations. A documentary was made about it called Crack House USA https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1991025/ where law enforcement obtained property and the appropriate warrants for their investigation. A real slice of life.
Read up on the reporting from Radley Balko, for Cato Institute, Reason, and the Washington Post more recently. His work on kicking down every possible justification for no-knock warrants and militarized civilian police forces is the best out there. I believe he also authored a book on the topic.
He absolutely is; I had been doing work for Reason for some years inclusive of the Cory Maye work, and met him for a short time. Not only is he a great guy to have a beer with, it was probably the most satisfying work of my career helping to amplify the visibility of his efforts.
Constitutional law, like any ancient code base, has picked up some serious cruft. It is impossible to divine from the text what it means.
Legal scholars don't even agree about basic questions like "can a professor publish a paper that lacks citations to relevant work, without violating securities law?" [1]. The odds of getting useful conlaw analysis on HN are nill.
That being said, we shouldn't always be looking to the COTUS to save us. Congress exists to make laws. If we want this practice banned, we need to enact a law to ban it.
> It is impossible to divine from the text what it means.
I don't buy that though, it wasn't written in Ancient Koine Greek or Hebrew on lost tablets, heck it wasn't written that long ago compared to ancient texts and scriptures!
We've got books and legal cases to reference and confirm what was meant, we even know all about the first cases handled by the Supreme Court. The moment people start to interpret instead of reading it literally and based upon the historical context (seeking refuge from tyranny) is the moment they get confused and get the whole thing wrong.
I'm always curious about this. Coming from a country with no Constitution - what makes this document so revered? Why does the opinion of a few dozen landed gentry from a few hundred years ago supercede all modern legal and political opinion and research?
They dont, amendments exist. Its entirely possible for the states to agree to new rules that will supersede the previous law of the land.
They do because they establish basic strictures on the federal government itself. Critically the constitution, and bill of rights, outline what powers are granted to the federal government and which are expressly reserved for the states and citizens. Its the inverse of many (most?) countries that Ive seen. The fed government was granted limited, specific, powers by its constituents. The states and citizens do not derive their rights & powers from the federal government.
The conceit is that it’s a written contract between the citizenry, the state governments, and the federal government that sets out what each is and isn’t allowed to do. It has provisions to be altered by the parties should it be found wanting which have been successfully used several times, despite requiring a supermajority.
The idea is to establish the rules of the political game by consensus, as a stabilizing influence on a government that can have its membership completely replaced every 6 years. Like any other contract, when there’s a dispute, the first thing to look at is what was actually agreed upon and then try to map that onto whatever situation you find yourself in.
Generally, the courts in the US view themselves as arbitrators: their job is to determine how the text of the law (including the Constitution) maps onto the many messy edge cases that come up in real life in the fairest way they can. That means, in part, making determinations consistently between various cases; this is where case law gets its authority.
In theory, political and moral concerns are not in the purview of the courts, but instead are be encoded in the written laws they interpret. Modern legal opinions need the endorsement of enough legislators to be enshrined at the appopriate level of law before they can be enforced; it makes for slow progress, but hopefully avoids a lot of wrong turns.
Because the us is a federation between widely different states. California and Alabama can agree on very little so they need the constitution to keep peace and the union.
Is politics is completely blocked these days, so most forward movements are by executive orders and appointing judges that can find creative ways to make your political agenda happening without having to do it in the senate.
It became a big thing because of the drug war, if you knock and announce yourself people will flush their drugs. The Drug War: the gift that keeps on giving.
You can't flush a very large quantity of drugs when the police knock on your door. Not only would you have to do a very extensive amount of pre-planning to destroy evidence, but 2 minutes is not nearly enough time to flush a sellable stash (i.e. if you're a dealer).
Sure, I guess you could have search warrants for small amounts of drugs (i.e. someone you just sold to), but to be perfectly honest kicking in doors over very small amounts of drugs (i.e. an end user) is beneath the dignity of the state to prosecute in that manner.
And even if you could flush your entire stash, you get a warrant either for the septic tank contents or what's about to enter the sewer. Almost like you have to do actual police work rather than kicking in someone's door in the middle of the night, throwing flashbangs into cribs, and massacring homeowners who dared defend themselves against what in any other circumstance would obviously be a violent home invasion.
(It should be absolutely embarrassing that laws get made like this; a lot of gun law is based on what Hollywood says about them rather than their reality.)
To add on to this, small-time distributors usually have a "clean house" policy.
Drugs are stored off-property or in places where further search warrants are required, like a safe, or a locked toolshed.
In the event something tips them off, they "clean house" and relocate their stash.
It's also dead simple to "stealth" processed drugs -- so simple in-fact that these drugs come in by foot, plane, and cargo boat seemlessly. The only thing you need to worry about is transportation in a vehicle with a tiny solution space for where the drugs could be hidden, upon a search, such as say a small boat or plane. Cars are hit or miss, because a few officers only deal with the dumbest of the dumb drug user day-to-day, while the coast guard has experience with more elaborate setups.
It's kind of ironic. Cops busting down dumb dealers has a way of culling the herd, removing the worst-prepared, and giving more information to the most-prepared, to be even better prepared.
This is a strawman argument, they did not say searching a home is not real police work:
> actual police work rather than kicking in someone's door in the middle of the night, throwing flashbangs into cribs, and massacring homeowners who dared defend themselves against what in any other circumstance would obviously be a violent home invasion.
I chose to ignore that part because it was impossible to come up with a good faith interpretation of it.
I've executed "no knock" search warrants (we would say "forced entry" or "MOE" in the UK) and caught suspects in the process of destroying evidence. This is like 15 seconds after attempting entry. 2 minutes is easily enough time to flush kgs of drugs or destroy a USB drive.
The constitution doesn't specifically address no-knock warrants, other than by incorporating practice at the time of the founding. Therefore, there are no consitutionally sound arguments for or against them.
I think no-knock warrants should be abandoned, because they are dangerous and of limited value, but neither of those reasons are constitutional arguments.
"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law"
I would argue that police officers transition into soldiers of the state when they hold what soldiers hold (bullet proof vests, flash grenades, automatic machine guns) and arrive in vehicles soldiers arrive in (MRAPs and other APCs). No-knock warrants are essentially the government choosing to "quarter" soldiers inside of some random person's house without their consent, for an unlimited amount of time.
Of course, the Constitution doesn't specify what the difference between a police officer and a soldier is, which I think is an important argument for the Supreme Court to hear anyways. A lot of what the police are (unfairly) allowed to do today stems from this blurred line. In most cases, soldiers are constrained even more than police are (i.e. Rules of Engagement).
That's quite a stretch. To quarter means to live somewhere not to violently search something.
IANAL but naively i would think that "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated..." would be applicable, since its kind of unreasonsble to do a no-knock warrant when a normal search would be fully sufficient.
non-American here. What about a situation were someone is suspected of say, having abducted a child? Hot pursuit like sounds like it involves some sort of immediate chase.
Or say a situation where domestic violence plays a role and someone would be threatened if the police announced themselves
Is there a good constitutional argument against no-knock warrants? Constitution says no unreasonable searches or seizure without a warrant. With no-knock warrants, there is warrant, so it isn't a constitutional issue. Just ban them. Everything doesn't have to be a foundational constitutional issue.
The text of the 4th could be interpeted to prohibit that kind of search. There are reasonable searches without warrants as well as unreasonable searches with warrants.
I've read the 4th amendment as a limitation on what can be done without a warrant, not with a warrant. But reflecting on what you wrote, and re-reading the 4th amendment, you are right, that having a warrant doesn't mean a search is automatically reasonable.
No-knock warrants can only be justified in cases where the evidence sought can be quickly destroyed, such as a small amount of soluble or combustible material, or written material (especially on "flashpaper").
In the Branch Davidian raid in 1993, Janet Reno's crew had sought a no-knock warrant, but they were denied because the objects of the warrant (fully automatic guns and conversion kits) can't be quickly destroyed. They used no-knock tactics anyway.
The problem isn't one is how to safely serve a surprise warrant, that's easy enough and no new gear is needed.
These cops did this plainsclothed. The warrant was for somebody that was already in custody. These police officers were not up to legitimate policing, they were clearly engaged in some form of criminal enterprise, and killed completely innocent people while doing it.
To solve this problem, we need to lessen police corruption. We need to have police officers consider the crimes of other cops to be actual crimes. There are literal gangs in the LAPD, with tattoos and everything, where members swear loyalty to their gang above and beyond any sort of service to the public. And then they are protected from ever being punished for any crime they commit.
This is probably not something that technology or more gear can solve. Until NYC police officers are law abiding enough to park legally in the city, we need to consider that somebody who is entrusted to enforce the law but does not obey it themselves is a serious threat to all of us.
The premise here is wrong. These guys aren't looking for better ways to deescalate - they're itching to kill. Never forget the UPS shootout last December where 19 cops opened fired, killing the hostage and a bystander, taking cover behind the cars of families.
The premise is not wrong. If you believe that the police force attracts certain kinds of unsavory individuals, then remove what makes said unsavories interested.
If police officers don't need to carry firearms as SOP because they are generally quite safe from gunfire then the individuals who join just to fire a gun (or what have you) will go elsewhere.
I agree, fewer of them should have guns. What I meant is that cops don't seem to genuinely want to take steps so that they "fear for their lives" less often. So it's the wrong approach to think that they wouldn't be so trigger happy if they just had the right protective gear.
I was just listening to some random Eddie Griffin interview about policing that resonated with me. He basically said, like a lot of difficult things in life, you need to rotate in and out of it. The reason so many cops are trigger happy, or fearful, or prejudiced, is because they are overexposed to the job. They need to be on rotation, a few months on the street, a few months back at the desk (something lighter).
Right now a lot of them are in messy codebase, fixing showstopper bugs 24/7. They are basically burnt and their perspective is no longer balanced.
It’s more in response to the litany of cases where cops reacted by shooting.
It sounds like a ridiculous idea for sure, but where are we exactly with full body armor and bullet proof visors (full body suit is even better than just a frontal bulletproof shield)? If we’re already there with the tech, then we can disarm them of guns and basically remove a scenario where a cop can kill.
We would need alternative weapons like high powered tasers.
>It sounds like a ridiculous idea for sure, but where are we exactly with full body armor and bullet proof visors (full body suit is even better than just a frontal bulletproof shield)?
That's usually what SWAT (and the comparable paramilitary "police" forces of other nations; most places call them 'gendarmes') are wearing.
That armor (ostensibly a Level IV ballistic vest) will not protect against multiple hits, but it will protect against most rifle fire (including what's supposed to be armor-piercing). The helmets are not as resistant, though, and areas not actually covered by armor are naturally not protected at all.
The reason that normal beat cops don't wear this is twofold: the first is that this armor is extremely heavy (and isn't guaranteed to protect, and being hit will still turn you into a casualty), and the second is that officers wearing heavy armor everywhere will lead to citizens asking more questions about what they need to be protecting themselves from. A "cop" who is in reality a paramilitary soldier with assault rifle at the ready [bonus points if it's fully-automatic; police ultimately don't need to provide that kind of suppressing fire] is not "serving and protecting", they're "seeking and destroying".
Of course, the way you minimize suspects shooting it out with the cops is by not making non-violent offenses life-destroying ones (i.e. criminal justice reform) and following the other Peelian principles, but that would require intelligence, moderation, and persistence from the public (as well as the police, of course), which is understandably yet unfortunately rare.
>> We would need alternative weapons like high powered tasers.
These are exceptionally unreliable weapons.
There's no real way to bulletproof a cop. Armor piercing .223 can go through pretty much any reasonable body armor / shields you would wear into a situation like this and is readily available to fire out of AR-15s and the like.
It's definitely possible for the value of "can it actually be done regardless of obstructions," super thick steel plating and such will get it done. But the officer will be basically immobile.
Kinetic weapons are tough to defeat using countermeasures, perhaps obviously so.
I like your line of thinking though. Too many people just complain about the status quo and relying on government action rather than potentially solving it another way. It's just that in this case, physics is a real bitch.
Weapon technology and armour technology tend to advance in lockstep.
The British invent the tank in WW1, the Germans develop a gun powerful enough to penetrate its armour. Tank armour gets thicker, guns get wheels. Tank armour gets thicker and slanted, you get the bazooka. Tanks get slat armour and explosive reactive armour, you get tandem-charge weapons. And so on.
I don't think there'll ever come a day when armoured troops can walk into gunfire like a firefighter can enter a burning building.
FWIW, it's worth remembering that weapons like tasers are 'less-lethal', not 'non-lethal'. Tasers, rubber bullets etc can all kill people, so it's still dangerous to hand one to a cop that has an itchy trigger finger. The number of deaths cops have caused using less-lethal weapons is certainly not enormous but it's more than zero.
> We would need alternative weapons like high powered tasers.
This sort of idea usually comes from folks that don't have much, if any, experience in combat -- or with violence at all, for that matter.
There's a reason that anesthesiologists are some of the most highly-paid (and highly-stressed!) medical professionals. Namely, that due to some rather sensible quirks of evolution and biology, it is absurdly difficult to, in any reliable way, rapidly yet temporarily incapacitate a human being without outright killing them.
Tasers are fantastically unreliable, typically only provide one or two "shots", and can not be reloaded in the field. If you are up against multiple assailants, a Taser is absolutely useless.
Also keep in mind that the sort of situations that police have to deal with evolve very, very rapidly. Seriously, watch some of the police body-cam videos on YouTube -- you can go from "routine traffic stop" to "armed combat with a numerically superior force" in a fraction of a second.
Fixing this would require doing some things that are politically very unpalatable, sadly.
The big one would be to focus on rehabilitation and prisoner care over punishment.
Suspects would be a lot less likely to fight back against police if (a) they felt that the justice system would treat them fairly; (b) the conditions inside of jail were safe and sanitary; and (c) conviction didn't absolutely screw your chances of future employment.
We'd also actually be better off if police only carried firearms (no tasers, OC spray, batons, etc.)
The more weapons you give a person, the more likely they are to use any of them -- e.g., an officer with both a Taser and a pistol is more likely to use both than an officer with only a pistol.
Ending the War on Drugs is also a good idea.
Finally: eliminate civil forfeiture, and pass a law mandating that all monetary punishment (from speeding tickets to fines levied against corporations by the EPA) be passed back to the taxpayer as a refund. Remove the revenue incentives for police departments to behave badly.
So I assume Paul will introduce a bill to end this in his next session. Or this is him just blowing hot air and a problem he only wants to pretend to solve. We'll know soon enough. My money is on the latter. You don't get to his level of politics in the US without kissing some major law enforcement asses. And those are some giant asses.
It does sound like something he might do. He has sponsored, consponsored, and supported bills to fund police body cameras, impose limits on roving surveillance, reduce or eliminate harsh treatment of prisoners, eliminate indefinite detentions, provide for sealing or expulsion of non-violent offenses, amend the controlled substances act, reform asset forfeiture laws,etc.
No-knock is obviously unavoidable at times. But it should only be done by specially trained police units, including the training not to shoot unarmed people. I believe it's done this way in most Western countries.
In Europe many just shake their heads and say "Only in America." German police (I'm sure many other police forces too) specifically first aim for the leg.
Even if that's really a thing there, U.S. case law makes it clear that if an officer has the luxury of just winging a perp, then her life was not in imminent danger and therefore use of deadly force was improper in the first place.
Seriously. He may be right on this issue, but fuck him for trying to out the whistleblower. That was a blatant disregard for the law and he should have been thrown in jail. It was disgusting.
I see a lot of people outraged and making emotional appeals. The wake of a tragedy isn't usually the best time to pass legislation, or even form a coherent opinion. There's an estimated 8000-50,000 no-knock raids per year (sources have numbers all over the place, Vox seems convinced it's 20,000) and since 1980, only 40 innocent bystanders have been killed. Overall, the risk of either an officer or civilian dying is ~1/1000. I'm not finding any good sources on how many people are arrested, or what the warrant is typically for, which is important to weigh the benefits. Incidents where they get the house wrong or an innocent person is hurt are newsworthy because they're rare and they can rile people up along political lines and push an agenda.
If there's a warrant for a dangerous person's arrest and you expect them to fight back, I'd rather that be in a no-knock raid in the middle of the night at their home with 50 police using military hardware, than one or two cops at a traffic stop that turns into a high speed chase/shootout in a busy public area.
Can you back up your assertion for not acting with legislation in response to a tragedy?
In pretty much any other aspect of life, from business to personal, people will react then.
Especially since this isn't a one-time tragedy, but one that plays out continually. We need to act now before we let this happen again. I'm going to need to see a citation on your numbers, but 40 since 1980 is once a year! By your criteria of not responding after a tragedy, you are actually arguing that we should never act at all.
My brief googling lead me to Wikipedia, which sources most of its statistics from the new York times, but I also read some stuff from the ACLU and other left-leaning news orgs. There's very little good data out there is my biggest takeaway.
Which brings me to my point, the reactions are emotional, not logical. If we're creating policy based on feelings that aren't backed by data or actually run counter to data, that's bad policy. Many areas do regular no-knock raid and many areas have banned them entirely. I expect organizations with strong opinions on this subject can investigate the effects and do better than the New York Times throwing 80 links to local news websites into a csv file on GitHub and then linking to it like it's an actual source.
My main question is why we should not react speedily. The desire to not act speedily seems be a desire that is an emotional one, not a logical one. There is a clear logical need to act quickly to prevent future abuses of power.
You have set up a scheme for which there is never a time to make change.
It's an emotional straw man to assume that speedy and decisive action is going to be haphazard. Please, let us act and act rationally and with thoughtfulness.
While 20,000 is a hell of a number per year, it's worth noting that we're not 100% sure it's only 40 innocent bystanders- for example, in this case it wouldn't have been deemed as such if the boyfriend hadn't survived.
What I'd be interested in, is how many no-knock warrants result in any shooting or casualties whatsoever. If that's still a really low number, this may not be as warranted.
> “The wake of a tragedy isn't usually the best time to pass legislation, or even form a coherent opinion.”
When they happen frequently enough, you’re always in the wake of a tragedy, and this becomes an excuse to perpetually do nothing. It’s like after every US school shooting it’s always “too soon to talk about legislation.”
Who knows how many other victims are out there? This case highlights it because the killed woman was a medical technician in the middle of the pandemic.
Normally her death might not have made the national press.
Your logic is not sound at all. You are saying no knock warrants are needed because the only alternative puts everyone in danger. We see in this very case, the opposite being true.
The justification in this case and in general isn't about the person being dangerous it's justified under the auspices that they might destroy evidence.
It isn't obvious to me that the risk of confusing people about what is going on and causing a situation where they think they need to fight back against home invaders outweighs the 20 seconds of warning a "dangerous" person might get because the cops don't knock.
The whole police immunity for murder and violence needs to stop. If a civilian did something similar even if under worse conditions they would be treated horribly by the cops and be put to jail under shitty conditions for years. A policeman can easily say "I was worried for my life!" when shooting an unarmed person but a civilians can't say the same thing if they shoot a cop that invaded their house, or even another civilian.
Hell, the police can even demolish your house during an investigation and they don't have to pay anything for it. https://www.denverpost.com/2019/10/30/swat-team-destroyed-gr...