How U.S. laws foster police brutality
A Dallas County grand jury in April declined to indict two Dallas police officers in the June 2014 fatal shooting of Jason Harrison, a mentally ill Red Bird man who was holding a screwdriver. Geoff Henley, an attorney who represented Harrison’s family, says laws make it too difficult to show excessive use of force by police.
Pervasive police brutality will persist far longer than the public suspects. Why? The answer is simple: the law allows it.
Under Graham v. Connor, the Supreme Court requires that Fourth Amendment excessive force claims be analyzed from the officer’s perspective during the incident. Judges are not to play Monday morning quarterback from the safety of their chambers. That’s a jagged pill to swallow for the mother of a dead teenager when it’s later shown that the deceased was unarmed.
Courts thus further require proof that the force was not just unreasonable, but “clearly” so. Though redundant, the standard requires proof that the force was so excessive that the officer would or should have known he was violating a person’s rights. If the law is not clear or settled, there is immunity. There is no jury trial; the case gets dismissed.
More troublesome are deadly force cases. In our Fifth Circuit, the court will exclude an officer’s escalation of an incident that might cause, for example, a mentally disturbed individual to subsequently react. The reaction might justify the officer’s deadly force.
An officer such as the one in Arlington who marched into the car dealership and killed an unarmed football player could still be immune — even if his reckless acts precipitated the victim to threaten deadly force. In sum, bad cops can bootstrap justifications for deadly force.
Smartphones and camera footage have shown myriad failings in our nation’s police departments. Technological advances, though, are meaningless, if the law does not likewise improve. Departments and police unions have resisted change. Changes within the law have been nonexistent, or glacially slow. It is past time to melt the ice."
http://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/latest-columns/20150814-geoff-henley-how-u.s.-laws-foster-police-brutality.ece
= new reply since forum marked as read
Step one: Officer decides to, how should we put this delicately, "go hunting"
Step two: Officer identifies intended victim
Step three: Officer harasses/threatens/otherwise provokes victim. If victim remains calm, continue escalating until a reaction is provoked.
Step four: "Stop resisting!" Execute victim. And because the escalations in step three are excluded by the courts, the officer has immunity.
If anyone without a badge did that, it would be an aggravating factor in first-degree murder. But it gets cops completely off the hook, thereby making modern day lynching and other assorted extra-judicial execution perfectly legal. 
