Why US Cops Can Kill Americans With Impunity

[The following post is by TDV Contributor, Wendy McElroy]

As I write, FOX News television is reporting on the following story, which is also posted to its website, “A protest against police-involved killings spun out of control for the second straight night in Berkeley, Calif. Sunday [Dec. 7], as demonstrators threw rocks and explosives at officers, turned on each other, and shut down a highway.” Two officers were injured. An undisclosed number of protesters were arrested. 

Anyone following American news knows the police are entirely out of control. They kill, beat, and brutalize non-resisting ‘civilians’ with impunity, even if that  person is a child, even if he is shot in the back. Police officers who kill unarmed and complying people are almost always vindicated by their department superiors and by a court system that will not prosecute. No wonder homicides by cops are at a two decade high despite a continuing decline in America’s overall homicide rate. 

The problem is not a few bad cops. It is the entire system of law enforcement. And the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) must shoulder blame for giving cops close to carte blanche to kill.

HOW SCOTUS LETS COPS KILL YOU

On March 27, 1985, SCOTUS ruled on Tennessee v. Garner. The case involved a Tennessee statute that gave the police a right to use “all the necessary means to effect the arrest” of a suspect fleeing the prospect of arrest. In 1974, a Memphis police officer did just that. He used deadly force against Edward Garner whom the officer suspected of burglary. Garner’s attempt to flee was blocked by a fence, which allowed the officer to catch up. When Garner began to scale the fence, the officer used deadly force despite being “reasonably sure” Garner was unarmed, about 17 years old and of slight build; he was actually unarmed, 15 years old and black. A Federal District Court upheld the statute and the officer’s conduct as constitutional; the Court of Appeal reversed the lower court decision as unconstitutional. And so the case proceeded up the legal food chain to SCOTUS.

It ruled that an officer’s use of deadly force must be “objectively reasonable.” That is, he must have “probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” In  Graham v. Connor (1989), SCOTUS found that reasonableness was based on the severity of the crime and/or whether the suspect posed an immediate threat to the safety or life of another person, including officers. The second justification left an officer free to subjectively and on the spot determine if a suspect was a danger; the  determination could be based on nothing more than the officer feeling threatened…or later claiming to have felt so. His superiors and the court system almost invariably support the officer’s evaluation. 

The effect: the courts no longer legally credit the idea of “excessive force” by a policeman who claims to have been threatened. It doesn’t matter if the suspect is unarmed, underage, handcuffed and the ‘crime’ is a petty one. Nor does it matter if the evidence indicates the absence of a threat. All that matters is the officer’s subjective opinion. 

HOW COMMON IS “EXCESSIVE FORCE” BY POLICE?

A headline (August 25, 2014) in the legal analyst site Law Blog stated, “Excessive Force By Police May Be More Common Than We Think.”

[A] report, commissioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, estimates that there were roughly 400 reports of “justifiable homicide” each year between 2005 and 2012. While victims like Michael Brown [black youth killed in Ferguson, Missouri] dominate the news cycle, it’s worth remembering that on average, police officers “justifiably” kill a black person nearly twice a week, every week, and 21 percent of the time, the victim is under the age of 21. That’s more than double the rate for white victims under the age of 21, which comes in at 8.7 percent. 

Law Blog went on to warn that FBI numbers “may be vastly unreported” because “many of these statistics are self-reported, and some law enforcement agencies do not report their incidents to the national database.”

University of South Carolina criminologist Geoff Alpert pointed out that “there is no national database for this type of information [use of excessive force], and that is so crazy. We’ve been trying for years, but nobody wanted to fund it and the [police] departments didn’t want it. They were concerned with their image and liability. They don’t want to bother with it.” [Emphasis added]

Alpert, who has researched the files of hundreds of police departments, commented, “it’s very rare that you find someone saying, ‘Oh, gosh, we used excessive force.’ In 98.9% of the cases, they are stamped as justified and sent along.”

CONCLUSION

The excessive and deadly force issue is merely one aspect of the police state America has become. (Click here for details on some other aspects.) The list includes:

• militarization of police so that small towns now have armored tanks
• total surveillance and gathering of civilian communications
• trivial ‘offenses’ lead to arrest and lengthy prison sentences
• the highest prison population in the world
• young children are being arrested for misbehaving in school

Protesters in Berkeley and elsewhere vow to keep hitting the streets until the police are brought under control. The police will never do so willingly and going through the courts is a long, arduous path. Accurately or not, protesters hurl the incendiary charge of ‘racism’ at police departments. Officers throw tear gas back. 

John W. Whitehead, President of The Rutherford Institute, is author of a book entitled “A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State.” He warned, “With each tragic shooting that is shrugged off or covered up, each piece of legislation passed that criminalizes otherwise legal activities, every surveillance drone that takes to the skies, every phone call, email or text that is spied on, and every transaction that is monitored, the government’s stranglehold over our lives grows stronger.”

The situation may need little more than another police shooting to reach a tipping point. 

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