Excessive Force
On the 18th of
June a
young man was arrested by police; he died on Sunday. He certainly
deserved to be arrested, but the manner and the results are
unacceptable. While celebrating a home-team win, he and some friends
passed a cluster of 10–12 police officers; he sarcastically
commented, wow, it seems like there’s a lot of crime on this
corner.
Very dumb, considering that he was breaking the law by
drinking in public. Kids, if you’re going to mock the police,
don’t do it while breaking the law. But the police—from
reports—violently over-reacted: eight officers and a supervisor
piled onto him, beating him and driving off his friends. In the
struggle, he stopped breathing, was rushed to a hospital and eventually
died of his injuries.
As I noted, he deserved to be cited or arrested, for blatant stupidity if nothing else. But the right thing to do would have been for two or three policemen to have approached him and then cited or arrested him. The wrong thing was to pile on. If he had resisted arrest, then it would have been appropriate to subdue him.
We are free citizens in a free republic: the police are our public servants. They should use politeness first, and force only when necessary. They should not see us as cattle to be herded.
This ties in with the abuse of SWAT teams and warrant-serving by force. By default, warrants should be served by a few officers: knock on the door, serve the warrant and get on with life. Sending a SWAT team to arrest an optometrist for a non-violent crime escalates matters unreasonably.
Yes, there are instances (many instances, perhaps) where force is necessary. But when force becomes the default; when law enforcement is held to a lower standard of accountability (note that the eggshell skull rule holds that you’re responsible even for unforeseeable consequences—but it’s not applied to the police), when citizens are routinely slain by their public servants—in that case, something has to change.
