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Sunday, June 25, 2017

How Do We Weed Out Cops Who Are a Public Menace?

There have been dozens of protests since Jeronimo Yanez was acquitted for killing Philando Castile just seconds after Castile calmly and rationally informed Yanez that he was in possession of a licensed firearm.

Castile's defense?
“I thought, I was gonna die,” St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez told investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension fifteen hours after the shooting. “And I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the 5-year-old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me. And, I let off the rounds and then after the rounds were off, the little girls was screaming.”
This is not credible -- that story was clearly concocted after the fact to explain away the cold-blooded assassination of an innocent man. Yanez wasn't thinking of a little girl's lungs and second-hand smoke while he was shooting Castile.

Yanez's story is revealed as a total crock by the presence of that same five-year-old girl and the front-seat passenger. They were in far more danger from the seven shots Yanez unloaded into the car than by some marijuana smoke.

Yanez was clearly driven by fear, and the only thing he was thinking was "Black man! Gun! Shoot!"

And this is still happening, almost on a daily basis.

Last Wednesday night a white police officer shot an off-duty cop (a black man) who had come to assist his fellow officers.

The shooter's excuse? He feared for his safety. But it's the same story: "Black man! Gun! Shoot!"

This is getting really old, really fast. Cops are supposed to be professionals. They're not supposed to let emotions like fear and anger influence their actions. Yet they pull this sort of crap every god-damned day. They're supposed to be trained to handle these sorts of situations. But instead they start popping off gunshots like some kid plinking away at bottles in the local quarry.

Castile got off because the jury believed he was afraid, even though there was video of the shooting and its aftermath. Jurors gave Yanez the benefit of the doubt because, if they had been in his shoes, they too might have pulled the trigger.

But they are civilians. They would never be in that situation because they don't have the right to stop cars on the street and intrude on people's privacy. If some random civilian armed with a gun had done the exact same thing Yanez did, stopping Castile's car and then shooting him, the cops would have called it carjacking, first-degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon and endangering a minor. The jury would have convicted him after an hour's deliberation, tops, especially if he was Hispanic like Yanez.

Cops have to be held to a higher standard. Because cops are given more power, they have to bear greater responsibility for their actions. They shouldn't be judged like civilians. As professionals, their internal emotional state should have no bearing whatsoever on how they carry out their duties. When they shoot innocent civilians out of fear they are being derelict in their duty and endangering the public at large.

A cop using his fear to excuse shooting an innocent civilian at a traffic stop is the same as a vice cop saying, "The hooker I was arresting made me horny so I had to rape her."

Being a police officer is a tough job. But cops who shoot innocent civilians and fellow officers are criminally incompetent and a danger to themselves, the police force, the cities and counties who employ them, and the public at large.

At a minimum Yanez is guilty of gross incompetence, gross criminal negligence and two felony counts of dangerous discharge of a firearm (charges he was, incredibly, acquitted of). He should have been fired as soon as his superiors saw the dashcam video of the encounter. It's outrageous that he received a year's paid vacation when he was put on leave.

And even though Yanez was acquitted, the case is not over yet. Yanez and the cities of Falcon Heights and St. Anthony are almost certainly going to be sued in civil court by Castile's kin and Diamond Reynolds, who was in the car.

Cities -- and the citizens who pay taxes -- fork over hundreds of millions of dollars a year for cops who screw up like this. All too often these cops have a long history of violence and shoddy police work.

Police officers who can't master their own fear have no business being cops. We have to find some way to weed out officers who can't make rational decisions in tough situations.

Of course, it must be noted that -- despite everything that the NRA says -- guns provide absolutely no protection: they make you a target, especially if you are a black man.

The omnipresence of guns in America and the rife paranoia they inspire in police officers is the number one reason why so many black men are shot.

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