Cops just shoot Everybody now, with surprisingly little social resistance [View all]

[cthulu2016]

There are enough people who reflexively side with police to put an upper limit on national outrage over cop shootings.

Cops now shoot people every day, without even 1% of the self-defense argument Zimmerman put forward, and without 1% of the legal scrutiny. A cop in Zimmerman's shoes would be given a medal!

Cops fire 100+ shots at an unarmed teenager and we don't examine what a reasonable person would have done. (The standard for self-defense) In practice, we seem to have a legal intent standard for cops, not the less forgiving reasonable standard we have for everyone else. Unless a cop demonstrably knowingly and intentionally murdered someone we assume self defense or other lawful killing because we assume that a cop is the walking definition of the legal entity known as the "reasonable person."

If a reasonable person would not have shot someone 8 times for scratching their eye-brow we set that aside because we, as a society, assume that if we wouldn't have shot in the circumstance that our failure to do so would be because we lack the training or experience of a cop.

We set aside our own notions of legal "reasonableness" of cop actions in the same way we defer to carpenters and dentists in their specialties.

And we also accept the unacceptable that "of course" prosecuters don't charge cops very often because they are team-mates... the prosecuters need the good will of the police to operate.