While Tam's advice is solid and takes into account the facts on the ground.
We should be outraged that it IS good advice!
I should never be in fear for my life from the police for doing something I have every right to do...
ie: Be on my own property with a gun.
We should all be opposed to this shoot first ask questions later attitude that our law enforcement has developed. We should demand the head of any department management who uses the "in accordance with our training" excuse.
You may notice that the people who are the staunchest advocates of "let the courts settle it" are the ones who are certain to get a pass from those courts. That's because shit that will land us in jail will cause them, at worst, to seek a job in another department.
Oppose the training excuse.
Demand that the police be held to the same standard as the communities they serve. Note, I am totally cool with being elevated to their weapons free status when it comes to thinking that someone might have looked at me cross eyed with virtually anything in their hand.
I am totally cool to take a time-out and get a month or more to decide what I am going to say to a non-judicial investigator before making a statement. Then if it goes against me, I am cool to have an arbitrator force the ruling back in my favor and never face criminal charges.
I am completely cool with the default assumption being that I had every reason to shoot and every effort should be expended to show my innocence by the police department, prosecutor and government.
I don't get that now, but my employees do...
But they're not employees. I am their vassal and they don't ever want me to forget it.
BLM Political bullshit aside, being a cop is a safe job....given what their job description is, it's AMAZINGLY safe.
ReplyDeleteAnd when it comes to officers getting killed, the VAST majority of officer-related death are traffic accidents. Officers getting shot is really statistical noise when you think of how many officers are out there. (You have a 0.005% chance of getting fatally shot this year if you have a badge, if I remember my numbers).
But then think of how many more people are killed by police shootings, the numbers change a little because its the millions of us, vs the hundreds of thousands of them.....still the chances of the very same cop putting a bullet into another person is several orders of magnitude higher than them feeling a bullet themselves.
Given that our culture accepts Fishermen, miners, and heavy machine operators....all of whom don't involve the public in their VERY dangerous jobs, cops need to accept at least a FRACTION of those other risks so that the people they protect and serve can be, in fact, better protected.