Police and Gun violence

 I'd like to strike a reasonable position. Here are some basic observations I don't believe a reasonable person can contradict:

• The job of a police officer, at times, requires them to put themselves into dangerous situations, and to make split-second decisions with lives at stake.
• Far too often, Black men are being killed by police when they were not posing a danger.

The task before America is to reconcile these two issues.

 

One important piece of that reconciliation is to recognize a middle ground between innocence and felony murder charges. The legal principle that has contributed to this situation is that a police officer who has a reasonable belief that a life is in danger is justified in using lethal force. This principle, in simple form, is reasonable. It is simply unfair to send a civil servant into a dangerous situation, risk their life and limb, and then treat them as a murderer if it turns out that the gun pointed at them was a wooden toy. It takes a second or two to be sure of what one sees, but a quarter of a second to pull a trigger.

 

However, this principle is only the legal threshold of crime. One can also ask if that officer's belief of their danger showed sound judgement. If not, that person should not be a police officer. Daniel Pantaleo, after he strangled Eric Garner, remained on the police force for five years. Regardless of whether or not he should have been charged with murder, to continue to use a choke hold on a prone, non-resisting man struggling to breathe, for five minutes, is unquestionably bad judgement. To me, it is also manslaughter--reckless disregard for life--but there can be no question that it was bad judgement. There was no excuse for retaining Pantaleo on the police force for five years.

 

The shooting death of Adam Toledo is very sad, but to be fair I find it hard to criticize the police officer. There may be details I do not know, but this is how it appears from my armchair: shots had been fired; Toledo had been carrying a gun; in a dark alley, the officer did not see that the gun had been dropped, and felt himself in danger. I don't see criminal responsibility here, or even bad judgement. 

 

The death of Adam Toledo is similar to the killing of Robert Finicum, the militia man involved in the Occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in 2016. If you are going to use guns in a confrontation with police officers, you might get shot. Sorry. It would be great if police could resolve the situation without killing anyone, but I'm not going to armchair judge.

Similarly, I am hesitant about charges in the death of Daunte Wright. If Wright had pointed his finger at Kim Potter, and she had shot him mistaking his finger for a gun, it would have been "reasonable force." But because the mistake she made was to be holding the wrong tool when she attempted to use less-lethal force, she has been charged with manslaughter. This is odd. 

 

Perhaps if the officers who shot Toledo and Wright had been involved in a number of other mistaken perceptions I might change my mind. In my experience there are people who rarely make these sots of mistakes, and people who often do. Even if no individual mistake is egregious, a pattern of mistakes is reasonable grounds for concluding that this person should not be a police officer. But I don't know that is the case here. The fact that Kim Potter resigned the police force after her mistake--ironically--is an indication that she might have been worth keeping.

Speaking of a "pattern of mistakes," clearly that is what police departments, as a whole, are exhibiting. I cannot fault the individual police officer who shot Adam Toledo. But it is another mistake of police departments, it is another piece of evidence that our policing system is not working. Changing the police system will take different work than lodging criminal charges against individual police officers. While the Derek Chauvins and Daniel Pantaleos deserve criminal consequences, many others are indeed just trying to do the job they were trained for. We need to change the job.