Maybe It’s Time To Privatize The Police
If police aren’t going to have special immunities and protections as officers of the state, maybe they shouldn’t be.
June 18, 2020 By David Marcus
On Wednesday Atlanta police officer Garrett Rolfe was formally charge with felony murder in the killing of Rayshard Brooks. While evading arrest after having assaulted Rolfe and his partner, Brooks points a Taser at Rolfe and fires. At that point, and exactly that point Rolfe takes out his gun and shoots. If this act of self-defense by a cop is felony murder, then we need to take a hard look at what the police are in today’s American society and what we wish them to be.
Traditionally the badge gives law enforcement officers wider latitude than it gives a regular citizen in using violence to prevent crime and physical harm. We offer this wider latitude because when police use violence they do so on behalf of society, not in furtherance of their own individual interests. We understand that the chaotic nature of crime will inevitably put police in untenable situations and since most of us don’t want to deal with crime ourselves, we offer legal support, as well as good pay and benefits to those willing to do the job for us.
But in the case of Rolfe, the Atlanta District Attorney Paul Howard does not appear to give the police officer any wider latitude based on his job, much the opposite in fact. The DA has almost nothing to say about the fact that Brooks resisted arrest, attacked police, stole a weapon and fired it at them. At one point Howard referred to Brooks’ behavior as “jovial.†The message is that Brooks’ actions were irrelevant to the situation. Rolfe should have been counting Taser shots and known in those split seconds that the person firing a weapon at him actually posed no threat.
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https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/18/maybe-its-time-to-privatize-the-police/
