Under the new doctrine of proportionality, cops are going to be prosecuted for pumping multiple rounds into the back of an unarmed perp running away from them.
Most police jurisdictions have not tolerated the scenario you mentioned anyway. They would not say that the officer was violating "proportional force" doctrine, so I respectfully submit that the scenario is irrelevant to this thread's discussion. I think we ought to take your scenario off the table to be able to see the more serious problem.
I see holding the police to "proportional force" as a good thing.
I sort of agree with you about that, because I do not blindly trust cops to do the right thing (especially if they are Democrats!), but that's not the real problem down the road for you and me. For example, neither of us is likely to be shot in the back running away from a local cop.
The real problem is that our cops (yeah, they are our guys and gals, even if some of them are self-important jerks) are going to get hurt or even killed if we default to letting federal judges micromanage them in every case of an officer-involved shooting. In that context, judicial micromanagement--i.e., on top of all the use-of-force protocols that have already existed in police departments--will make the career of a police officer exceedingly unenticing for purposes of recruiting (and we could get some real weirdoes inducted into our shrinking police departments).
One of the most worrisome aspects of the micromanagement problem is that everything that the cop does will be second-guessed by a likely hostile, activist judge. "Second-guessing" concerning the common-sense. departmental-policy-compliant propriety of a given cop's actions has been traditionally handled by local Police Review Boards. But as one poster on this thread has intimated, politically unreliable judges will take over as the supreme arbiters of every juicy case. Every juicy case will be a circus arena with the media-driven rabble pointing thumbs down for the cop.
Having already expressed my sentiments about the peculiar language of "proportionality," I would point out again that the vague
language of "proportionality" poses a potentially monstrous problem: If we too eagerly (too carelessly?) embark upon reining in the cops at a federal level
and also use too-subjective language to do so
and also permit federal judges to be the supreme arbiters of those cases , we really will put our cops in handcuffs (as the title of the article suggests). Thus, I fear that we will wind up with unintended and very bad consequences for our already deteriorating state of law-and-order. Having a federal judge tell our cops that they must never use even an iota of force beyond the barest minimum necessary will definitely tend to make our police far, far less effective in protecting us.
As I have already stipulated, I do not blindly trust cops to do the right thing. But the biggest problem we have at this time is bad judges, not bad cops. That is what the headline of the article reminds me.
(As a side note, I will point out that even civilian CCW permittees who wind up using their firearms often get into enormously serious legal trouble from parties who were not present at the scene of a righteous shooting--on the grounds that the CCW permittee was not following a doctrine of proportionality. At some point this mess of nit-picking legalism in lieu of lawfulness tends to gut the 2nd Amendment, does it not?)