A key fact is that the police shot Taylor after her boyfriend shot at the police, thinking they were intruders. While he was fully entitled to do that, the NYT doesn’t believe in gun rights so that’s a messy fact. To make the victim seem more sympathetic, the narrative under the heading “What Happened in Louisville?” doesn’t mention Taylor‘s boyfriend shooting first. Instead, you need to go down several paragraphs to learn that fact. Which leaves the whole article deeply confused: at first you think police just started shooting for no reason, and then later you learn they shot because they were fired upon. Which of course leaves the reader with little understanding of what police actually did wrong. Were they not supposed to shoot back when Taylor’s boyfriend shot at them? Is that the problem?
Obviously nobody expects the police not to shoot back when fired upon. What the police did wrong, instead, is failing to respect black peoples’ second and fourth amendment rights. This happened in Kentucky, where if you barge into someone’s house in the middle of the night you can expect to get shot. Police barging into people’s homes in the middle of the night unannounced is fundamentally incompatible with what the Constitution and Kentucky law gives homeowners the right to do: shoot at intruders in their home. And as such the practice of serving these no-knock warrants is an infringement of that right. It leads to tragic consequences under predictable circumstances where homeowners are just exercising their rights. And of course, it’s doubtful that officers display the same callousness to the possibility of armed homeowners when it comes to policing white neighborhoods. It’s another one in a long pattern of cases where black people are murdered for daring to exercise their second amendment rights.
How about: they should be held responsible for the preventable death of this woman in a situation they directly and deliberately created? Is that not the problem?
I don't think anyone is demanding a first degree murder conviction here. They didn't walk in with the intent to kill her. But they sure as shit did kill her, and it's all their fault that it happened. Sounds like open and shut manslaughter to me.
Because one of these is very easy to fix and would 100% mean Taylor would still be alive. The other would be super difficult to fix and who knows if it would have saved her life.
How about: If you do something that could be met with justified self defense and you encounter that self defense your first instinct as police should be to retreat and clarify the situation?
Why is it reasonable to have the first instinct to shoot back?
In general I do think there are many situations where police should not automatically return fire when fired upon. Not all situations – but many situations.
Also, I’m not obsessed with making all criminal acts impossible or making sure that there are never any loopholes or ways for criminals to get away with something.
First of all, that’s an impossible standard to meet even if you put no limits at all on police action. Crime happens regardless and criminals get away with it. (Which is not intended to be defeatist hyper-cynicism. My intention here is to say that perfection in terms of solving crimes is an impossible standard even if you don’t give a fuck about human rights and dignity. You have to measure differently.)
Second, policing that respects human dignity and reduces overall harm (as opposed to being fixated on this one possibility of some criminal getting away with it) will sometimes lead to criminals getting away with it and that’s a trade-off I’m more than willing to accept.
I would be much more keen on talking about trade-offs, otherwise you always run into the trap of running into a situation where a policy could possibly in some way be abused by criminals and as soon as that happens this policy is automatically no good anymore. That seems like dangerous dead-end thinking to me. You always run into stop signs.
Loopholes are a valid argument against a policy, however they are not the final argument against a policy. Put them on the con-side and keep on thinking about it in terms of trade-offs.