This is disingenuous. Few reasonable people would suggest that the police have authority to kill because someone litters, has a broken tail light, or sells single cigarettes in violation of New York law. Depending on your viewpoint and the situation, killings occur because people resist the police, because people run from the police, because the police are trigger-happy and biased, or because the police are murderers. One might even think that it is ridiculous to ban sales of single cigarettes. Even so, this piece suggests I should not support laws banning littering unless I believe the police should be authorized to kill litterers. This is ridiculous. Of course we can support a law even if we believe that a violator should not be subjected to summary execution.
I've been something like this for days.. Why are the police pulling people over for busted tailights/etc? Isn't having a yearly car inspection regime enough? How frequently do tail lights burn out, and is it that critical to everyone's safety that it gets fixed as soon as cop sees it or can it wait for a few months until the state inspection. Don't most cars have some kind of indicator that a light is blown? Basically the vast majority interactions most people have with the police are when they are acting like thugs/tax collectors and enforcing fee's for minor infractions of laws that weren't even on the books more than a couple dozen years ago and for the most part haven't done anything to improve safety.<p>Basically, the police culture seems to focus on over-policing useless things like traffic enforcement while under-policing dangerous parts of town with beat cops.
Police have become the threat that the Founders feared when they talked about the dangers of a standing army. Either they need to be armed with non-lethal weapons only, or they need to stand trial for each killing (severally and collectively), or both.
I'd like to see more coverage of the libertarian candidates this cycle. Neither major party seems likely to fix this issue -- Republicans will dismiss it and Democrats will pander and apply band-aids (all the while increasing the scope of government).<p>And the libertarians this time around are serious candidates -- president and VP nominees are both two-term governors. Pretty hard to ignore when the major candidates are so bad.
Before you start blaming racism and all such manner of things consider some interesting statistics.<p>Other western countries have much lower police fatalities, being a police officer in the US is way more dangerous than other western countries.<p><a href="http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.nleomf.org/facts/officer-fatalities-data/year.htm...</a><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officers_killed_in_the_line_of_duty" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer...</a><p><a href="http://www.npm.org.au/honour-roll" rel="nofollow">http://www.npm.org.au/honour-roll</a><p>I could not find a source but it would be nice to see a break down of
- killed illegally
- killed by accident
- injuries
- gun
- knives
- etc<p>Broken down by country/per capita, I think we would find (my opinion as I couldn't find the stats) that the US is abnormally high to its peers.
I don't see how this follows. Not all laws permit use of deadly force. And it's not even the laws per se as much as the circumstances and criteria around authorization of deadly force. I've been trying to learn about this lately, and it seems as though the supreme court case Graham v. Connor [1] is heavily implicated in the fact that very few of these police are convicted despite how objectionable the circumstances have seemed.<p>As a side note, if you're interested in this type of thing, Radiolab has just started an excellent podcast on supreme court cases called More Perfect [2].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Connor" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_v._Connor</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolabmoreperfect" rel="nofollow">http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolabmoreperfect</a>
This looks to be a variant of the point about applying infinities to human lives in public policy.<p>Basically, a tiny non-zero chance of death still means a finite numbers of lives killed by the policy. And any police encounter has some tiny chance of escalating to lethal force by either side.<p>But the obvious implication, to me, is "hey, everything has a cost in lives, that shouldn't be a dealbreaker". However, the author uses it in a way that implies that it's some useful heuristic for which laws are good, rather than a trivial point about the ever-present risk of death.<p>(I expected it to be a point about how, if you want to enforce any law, you have to apply increasing escalation against those who resist it. Refusal to comply -> arrest; resistance of arrest -> force; resistance of force -> death)
"But it is also true that police abuses are far more likely to victimize poor African-Americans and other politically weak groups."
-Did the author provide any evidence for this statement?
>Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.<p>Really seems like they are missing the obvious answer:<p>IF you don't want to die, don't resist police orders. Do your resistance in the courts.
But what if they completely resisted the law to the point of shooting back? Well then it's the shooting back that will get them killed. There is a rather short list of things the police ought to be shooting at, and they all boil down to endangering life. Going on a gun rampage. Going on a knife rampage. Holding hostages.<p>Selling cigarettes is not on that list and the only reason that cops get away with it, is a culture of fear and egregious defensive overreaction, which treats unarmed black men as threats equivalent or worse than a white guy with a pistol drawn.
The article is mis-titled and mis-leading, and detracts from the core principle. Any law, no matter how minor, can be escalated by a resisting citizen (or a bad cop) into a bigger, more violent situation.<p>After a fair reading of the article the real argument goes something like this:<p>1) The sheer number of laws means every citizen is in violation on a regular basis. Especially for trivial things like rolling through a stop sign, selling loose cigarettes, changing lanes without a signal, etc.<p>2) Every violation is an opportunity for a police encounter. A population that has only 10 laws to obey will have lower encounter rate than a population that has 1000.<p>3) Each police encounter has a non-zero chance of resulting in violence. Be it a citizen resisting and the cops responding with violence. Or in a cop making a fatal mistake, or a cop overreacting to a situation. There is some likelihood of a violent outcome.<p>4) Improved officer training and tactics alone are a limited way to lower the per-encounter violence rate. Oversight and accountability are difficult to implement due to various institutional and political barriers.<p>5) A better, safer, long-term solution is to reduce the total number of encounters by reducing the total number of laws a citizen is required to obey. Fewer encounters mean fewer opportunities for violence.<p>My main objection to this argument is that #5 would be as difficult to implement as #4. Paring down the number of laws will take a lot of political will and capital. Changing the institutions of policing and prosecution will take just as much political will to change. We should probably do both.
I think a big part of the problem is that people want to be able to break some laws (the ones that "are wrong" or "shouldn't apply to me", or just the ones that they want to), and suffer no consequences for doing so. And then, when the police try to enforce some consequences, the people feel like they (the police) shouldn't do that, are wrong to do that, and therefore they (the people) are right to try to defeat the police, either by running away or by direct attack.
There are lots of ways to enforce laws without using armed police. In the UK you have to take your car for annual inspections which covers tail lights, speeding and the like get caught by cameras, parking is covered by traffic wardens writing tickets with no guns or arrests involved, non payment of tax results in fines. Personal drug use is mostly ignored. You only really need arrests for things like theft or assault.
I'd want to see how the law "don't shoot after fleeing suspects unless they pose an immediate threat to others" will need deadly force to be effective. The normal way laws are enforced is by threatening to remove privileges.<p>In my opinion the discussion should be around the way the police force interacts with people. If some laws get abolished in the process, that's probably good.
This is silly. Breaking laws comes with penalties, which are determined by the courts. There is nothing that inherently states that lawbreakers must be forcibly moved to a government-controlled site; furthermore there's nothing that says people who try to resist arrest should be met with lethal force.
<p><pre><code> Carter correctly points out that the massive growth of
criminal and regulatory law means that almost anyone can
potentially end up in the same situation as Eric Garner.
</code></pre>
So does Carter and author suggest reducing the number of laws? Or should we just take it that law enforcement abusing power causing deaths are inevitable?