General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Why Many Police Traffic Stops Turn Deadly [View all]The Magistrate
(95,243 posts)When an armed agent of the state kills an unarmed citizen, a serious wrong has been done.
Your attempt to pretend otherwise says something unpleasant about your attitudes towards authority and violence.
You are correct that I consider a person who has been given arms and the authority of the state to be placing themselves at some risk the general run of citizens do not face. That is a choice freely made by accepting the employment.
Your position amounts to what I have described, that the officer's life is worth the lives of a good many citizens. Since the fact is that in a great proportion of instances where an officer shoots an unarmed citizen, the officer was not under any real threat, it is a simple matter to produce a ratio --- the number of police killed by citizens the officer took to be unarmed but actually were not, compared to the number of unarmed citizens killed by police.
When wielding deadly force you do not get to make mistakes, and are wholly responsible for any error you make. Police officers who claim to be in fear for their lives from an unarmed citizen, and kill the citizen, are not fit for the job, and ought to be personally and criminally liable for the cowardice and extremely poor judgement they displayed.