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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Silly Mundane -- "Civil Rights" are for Killer Cops The United States Constitution, as Seattle police officers pretend to understand it, extends to police an unqualified right to the discretionary use of aggressive force, and prohibits “second-guessing” by those who are not members of the State’s coercive caste. Inhibiting the exercise of that entitlement, the officers claim in a lawsuit filed against the U.S. Justice Department and the City of Seattle, would be a “violation of the Second, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.” In 2012, after a Justice Department investigation concluded that Seattle police officers routinely use unnecessary force, the City of Seattle implemented a new use-of-force policy and agreed to the creation of an independent police monitor. The current lawsuit, which was filed on behalf of more than 100 Seattle cops, complains that those trivial and inadequate restrictions created “vaguely defined, newly protected classes of suspects” and violate the officers’ supposed “right not to be required to take unnecessary risks.” An “unnecessary” risk, on this construction, would occur any time a police officer is required to use “significantly less force than is being threatened against them by suspects … [who] appear to be or are engaged in threatening and dangerous conduct.” (Emphasis added.) Police are trained to believe that they put their lives at risk in every encounter with a citizen, and to regard any gesture of non-compliance as an immediate and impermissible risk to that most sacred of all considerations, “officer safety.” At present, in most of the country a police officer who brutalizes or kills somebody without moral justification can take refuge in the “totality of circumstances” test. In practice, this is nothing less than an unalloyed entitlement to kill first, and devise a suitable rationale after the fact. Seattle’s new use-of-force guidelines, the police lawsuit objects, require officers – who, as a class, are selected on the basis of limited intellectual agility – “to engage in mental gymnastics wholly unreasonable in the light of the dangerous and evolving circumstances we face every day. This creates unnecessary and, therefore, unconstitutional risks to Plaintiffs’ safety.” Just as unconscionable, from the cops’ perspective, is the fact that their violent actions would be subject to what they call “the very second-guessing prohibited by the Constitution” – that is, their actions would be scrutinized by people who are not part of their privileged class. This distant possibility of accountability “places unconstitutional risks and burdens on the Plaintiffs’ lives and livelihood,” pouts the civil complaint. Those unacceptable risks can be avoided, of course, if police officers unwilling to deal with the modest dangers associated with that vocation would pursue other employment. The vexatious and complicated conditions imposed by official “use-of-force” guidelines would be unnecessary if police officers were subject to the same non-aggression standard that applies to everybody else. But extracting aggressive violence from law enforcement would be as futile as attempting to dehydrate water. The use-of-force approach preferred by the Seattle police plaintiffs was displayed in the August 30, 2010 murder of John T. Williams on a street corner by Officer Ian Birk. Williams, a partially deaf, 50-year-old alcoholic woodcarver who suffered from psychological problems, was shot four times by Birk within a few seconds of the encounter Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread Top • Page Up • Full Thread • Page Down • Bottom/Latest
#1. To: Lorie Meacham (#0)
Amen. According to Forbes - The 10 Deadliest Jobs: 1. Logging workers 2. Fishers and related fishing workers 3. Aircraft pilot and flight engineers 4. Roofers 5. Structural iron and steel workers 6. Refuse and recyclable material collectors 7. Electrical power-line installers and repairers 8. Drivers/sales workers and truck drivers 9. Farmers, ranchers, and other agricultural managers 10. Construction laborers How many of these people "feel threatened" every day that they go to work? And how many go to work all swatted-up? “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
Indeed! May I borrow that?
Absolutely. Search for 'most dangerous jobs in america' and stand back. “The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable.” ~ H. L. Mencken
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