NYPD was given a license to kill today.
How? Does a grand jury decision set binding legal precedent? Did they change a New York statute?
I think it's fair to argue that the grand jury was wrong (though that's kind of a tough position to take, because they had access to all the evidence and to explanations of the controlling law, which you don't know.) I also think it's really fair to question the whole grand jury system in the first place. Maybe there should be a rule saying auto-trial every time an officer kills an unarmed person. But that rule doesn't exist, and apparently given the rules that do exist a jury of our peers did not think the evidence merited a conviction.
I think there's a very good argument to be made, and a lot of evidence building up to support the argument, that cops tend to use more force in responding to incidents with blacks than with whites. That's why I made the Tommy Rees post a few pages back; he was a big guy who used physical force to resist an arrest. The cop responded with pepper spray and not pistol fire because of his preconceptions going into the incident: he knew that he was dealing with a drunk college kid, he wasn't worried that Rees was going to pull a gun or a knife.
Compare that to a lot of these videos and to the Brown killing; the cops seem a little bit too eager to resort to lethal force in response to perceived danger (worth noting that a chokehold is not normally lethal force). Is that discriminatory? I think so. But I also have trouble blaming the cops because they aren't making the danger up. When a split second delay can kill you, you sometimes have to act on less than perfect information. Like I said earlier, we probably want our cops going on patrols in high crime areas, even if it means a mistake is made every now and then.
It's also worth noting that there is a common theme to all of these videos. The eventual victims do ignore or actively disobey the officer's orders. And I think that is, in the end, why Grand Juries have been unwilling to indict the officers. I think there's a sense that once you choose to ignore a police officer's orders -and certainly if you choose to try to physically resist a police officer- you have actively risked your life.
In general we (as a society) want to have police actively patrolling the streets, especially in dangerous areas. We want people to cooperate with police. And we don't want to risk making rules that restrain police in ways that might get them killed.
So I guess I share your sense that these deaths are tragedies, but not your sense of outrage.
