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cloudboy -> RE: Rioting is the answer (8/20/2014 7:16:37 PM)
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quote:
The operative word being used in the above statement is "the majority of cases" not "all" cases. You know, the police should get the benefit of the doubt mainly because their jobs can turn deadly and violent in a split second. You hope that they are restrained and trained enough to deal with it proportionately, but shit happens and sometimes they fuck up. It happens, it is not excusable, and should be prosecutable if a crime was committed. This kid that was shot may have done nothing to deserve it, and if that is the case, I will lead the brigade to prosecute the police officer for whatever crime they see fit to charge him with.
"I've looked at records in hundreds of departments, and it is very rare that you find someone saying, 'Oh, gosh, we used excessive force.' In 98.9 percent of the cases, they are stamped as justified and sent along,” Alpert told USA Today. "
--Geoff Alpert, a criminologist at the University of South Carolina
Scant Accountability For Police
For decades, advocates have lamented a dearth of national data on police shootings and police accountability. Yet still, little is available to quantify excessive force and accountability. Limited assessments of some cities and incidents paint a picture. A series of investigations by the Philadelphia Inquirer in the mid-1990s found that punishment imposed on officers by the police department was reversed or reduced nearly two-thirds of the time after going to arbitration. In New York, despite many fatal shootings, not one officer was convicted of homicide for an on-the-job shooting between 1977 and 1995. And in the Atlanta area, a spokesperson for the Fulton County District Attorney told Human Rights Watch he could only recall three instances of police officers being charged for anything at all over a five-year period. "
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/08/12/3470313/justice-race-and-michael-brown/
Police shootings are emotionally and politically charged events, fraught with forensic and legal difficulties. Officers say civilians cannot fathom what it is like to be in a shooting. Eyewitnesses contradict each other. Officers often can't remember how many times they fired. Top District officials must balance law and policy against the imperative that police officers not feel intimidated in using their weapons to protect themselves or others.
"Anybody can second-guess you on this stuff," said Officer John Diehl, who shot and wounded two men in a 1994 incident ruled justified, and wounded another man last month in an incident still under investigation. "You second-guess yourself a lot."
Said lawyer Arthur Burger, who defended police in the corporation counsel's office in the late 1980s: "The lawyers sit in air-conditioned courtrooms and go over jury instructions, and we debate these things and parse the words, and the cop had two seconds to shoot or not shoot. On some dark night when all our heads were on our pillows, this guy had to make a snap decision."
The investigations can grind on for years. Prosecutors took 2½ years to charge Officers Roosevelt Askew and William Middleton with lying about a fatal 1994 car shooting – even though Askew in his first interview with a prosecutor had acknowledged to telling a false story about why he shot and killed an unarmed driver. The U.S. attorney's office took four years to decide not to charge Officer Daniel Hall in a fatal 1993 car shooting. Hall still has not been restored to full duty status while the department decides what to do with his case, according to police officials.
But despite the time the investigations take, The Post found several cases that cast doubt on how thoroughly and impartially police investigate shooting cases. All these shootings were ruled justified:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/local/longterm/dcpolice/deadlyforce/police1page4.htm
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