"Why It's Impossible to Indict a Cop" -- The Nation

I'm trying to take a temporary step back from the outrage over the lack of indictments of police officers in all these unnecessary killings to consider the other side.    I know that there is a reason to build in protection for those who put themselves in danger to protect us.    Who would become a cop if they were likely to be thrown in jail for doing their job?

Still, the police self-protections are also a screen behind which all kinds of evils can occur -- from blind unconscious racism to blatant incompetence to outright sadism and psychopathic murder.

There has to be some balance, and we do not seem to have found that place.    Chase Madar has written a long piece for The Nation on how the system works.  He explains, as the title to his article puts it: "Why It's Impossible to Indict a Cop."

"How to police the police is a question as old as civilization . . . .  Last year, the FBI tallied 461 “justifiable homicides” committed by law enforcement—justifiable because the Bureau assumes so, and the nation’s courts have not found otherwise. This is the highest number in two decades, even as the nation’s overall homicide rate continues to drop. . . . 

"[T]he Missouri Revised Statutes . . . .  authorizes deadly force 'in effecting an arrest or in preventing an escape from custody' if the officer 'reasonably believes' it is necessary in order to 'to effect the arrest and also reasonably believes that the person to be arrested has committed or attempted to commit a felony…or may otherwise endanger life or inflict serious physical injury unless arrested without delay.'    [Note:  Missouri's current statue is consistent with the Supreme Court's jurisprudence, based on  'objective reasonableness.']

" . . .  How this reasonableness should be determined was established in a 1989 case, Graham v. Connor: severity of the crime, whether the suspect is resisting or trying to escape and above all, whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety of officers or others. . . .  [I]n actual courtroom practice, 'objective reasonableness' has become nearly impossible to tell apart from the subjective snap judgments of panic-fueled police officers. American courts universally defer to the law enforcement officer’s own personal assessment of the threat at the time.

"The Graham analysis essentially prohibits any second-guessing of the officer’s decision to use deadly force: no hindsight is permitted, and wide latitude is granted to the officer’s account of the situation, even if scientific evidence proves it to be mistaken. . . . [L]egal experts find that 'there is built-in leeway for police, and the very breadth of this leeway is why criminal charges against police are so rare,' says Walter Katz, a police oversight lawyer. . . .  

"Given the deference and latitude hardwired into the law, “there is just an underlying assumption that the officer did not engage in criminal activity,” says Katz. . . .  The reality is, it is extremely difficult to get law enforcement to police itself, and self-regulation is here, just as it is in poultry processing or coal mining, a sick joke.

 ". . . Police shootings are only one function of living in one of the most heavily policed societies in the world. Any movement to roll back this creeping over-criminalization is going to have to look beyond criminal prosecutions of individual police and take in the big picture. . . . 

"Police demilitarization, the decriminalization of working-class people, new policing models: these are all projects that could work in Ferguson and thousands of other American cities. . . .  These big-picture reforms are fundamentally political solutions that will require long-term effort, coalition politics that spans race, ethnicity and political affiliation—a challenge, but also a necessity. . . .  In the meantime, the constant stream of news reports of unarmed, mostly black and Latino civilians killed by police demands bigger, bolder approaches. They are the only available paths to getting the police under control."

Of course there can be no simple solution to such a complex and historically entrenched culture.   But it is discouraging when we are in the midst of what seems a tsunami of white police killing unarmed young black men and boys.

Ralph