How To Stop Fatal Police Shootings — Dead

How To Stop Fatal Police Shootings — Dead

You are about to watch a man being murdered. Be warned, some of you may find this distressing.

That’s right, the victim was wearing headphones, obviously couldn’t hear, and was shot in the back fatally. Then what does this fucking imbecile do? Right, he handcuffs him. And what did the authorities do? They put a blind eye to the telescope. Just like Nelson at the Battle of Copenhagen.

Watching that short clip reminded me of this scene from the classic 1973 Clint Eastwood film Magnum Force.

In that film the police were murdering bad guys, albeit without due process. In the United States though, it’s innocent people who are murdered, battered, and everything in between. And what do you morons do? Yes, I’m talking to you, Black Lives Matter. You make it a racial issue. You even blame it on White Supremacy. As if. Here is another innocent, unarmed white man being murdered by the police. This time the pig who offed him was tried, and guess what, the jury acquitted him.

You’ll probably recognise this poor guy; this is Walter Scott being murdered by Officer Michael Slager. Slager was charged with first degree murder. As with the murders of Daniel Shaver and Dillon Taylor, this was an open and shut case, but Slager’s trial resulted in a hung jury, and it was only a plea bargain that saw him sentenced subsequently to twenty years. None of these men needed to die.

In the UK where police shootings are not an everyday occurance, firearm’s officers are far better trained, the first two would almost certainly not have happened. I realise that the situation in the US is very different, but even when you have an armed citizenry it should not be an option to shoot first and ask questions as an afterthought. There is though a simple way to halt most of these shootings and unnecessary deaths. All it would require is a simple change in the law.

I’m now going to explain what that change is, and how we got to where we are. To do this, I’m going to go all around the houses, but if you bear with me, in a few minutes you will understand.

Earlier this year I read a report that the Crown Prosecution Service - the equivalent of your Department Of Justice - had been fined £200,000 in 2015 for losing what was called highly sensitive information. This year it received a £325,000 fine for a similar data breach. I was curious as to who would pay the fine, so e-mailed the body concerned - the Information Commissioner. My e-mail was ignored, so were my two follow up e-mails. It was only when I contacted the man at the top directly that I received a response.

This sort of behaviour is symptomatic of the way many civil servants treat us little people. In the United States, they even treat Congressmen and Senators the same way, as you will have realised if you have been following the attempts by Devin Nunes and others to extract information from the Department Of Justice about the great Trump-Russia hoax.

The second takeaway from my e-mail exchange is that the fine levied on the CPS is paid to another branch of Government, in particular to the Consolidated Fund. In other words, the people at the top do something careless, something stupid, something bad, or even something terrible, and all that happens is the Government transfers money from its left pocket to its right.

In July 2005, Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead in London by a police officer. A discussion of the full circumstances of this shooting would take us too far afield, suffice it to say it was a tragic case of mistaken identity. He was shot in the head at point blank range because it was suspected he was wearing a suicide belt. Rather than charge the officers concerned or anyone else with murder, manslaughter, or any crime for which they could be held personally culpable, it was decided the Metropolitan Police should be prosecuted under health and safety regulations, I kid you not. The organisation was convicted and fined. Again, money was simply moved by the Government from its left pocket to its right, a lot of money was generated for lawyers, and police officers who could have been doing something useful sat around for days waiting to perjure themselves in court. On top of all that, the carpet muncher in charge of this bungled operation is now the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police.

So how did this madness come about? To understand, we need to go back to the Nineteenth Century. Here is a quote from an article on the UK Parliament website about factory legislation.

“In 1844, Parliament passed a further Factories Act which in effect was the first health and safety act in Britain. All dangerous machinery was to be securely fenced off, and failure to do so regarded as a criminal offence. No child or young person was to clean mill machinery while it was in motion. The Act limited the hours worked by children to six and a half, with three hours’ schooling, and set a maximum 12-hour day for young people between 13 and 18. The 12-hour rule also applied to women.”

That’s what you morons call white privilege.

This was the beginning of strict liability laws as they are understood today. Factory work in those days was often dangerous. If you’ve ever worked in a modern factory with lathes, or even a bakery, you’ll have noticed there are guards on machines and safety procedures that are regulated by law. The employer is responsible for any breaches of safety law, including injuries to staff. Even if he is not on the premises.

Vicarious liability can be considered an offshoot of strict liability. In Limpus v London General Omnibus Company, (1862), it was ruled that a master is vicariously liable for the torts of his servants. There is more to it than that, but that should be enough.

In English law, a limited company is a person, that was established in Saloman v Salomon, (1897). If a man breaks the law, he can be punished with loss of liberty. But a company is only a legal person, not an actual one. This means that in practice the only way to punish a company is to fine it. Police officers are agents of a company: the county, the state, the nation...However you phrase it, when a police officer damages property or a person, the penalty is paid by the employer. In practice, this means you, the public, any damages paid come out of your taxes. Normally, the police fight all the way then settle at the court door with no admission of liability. So here is the solution, a law must be passed, a simple law, shifting the liability from the county to the police union.

That probably won’t stop the murder of a man in a Walter Scott type situation where the pig doesn’t realise he’s being filmed, and it won’t prevent either juries acquitting obviously guilty men or district attorneys declining to prosecute in the first place. But, if the Fraternal Order of Police had to shell out three or four multimillion dollar settlements over the course of a year or two, the thugs on the street would definitely be reigned in. Now you know what the real problem is, and the solution, what are you going to do about it?