I mean, there weren't any criminals here at all, but let's pretend they were dealing out of the apartment, as the reporting has suggested was the impetus. How many escaped drug dealers are worth one Breonna Taylor?
How many escaped drug dealers are worth one Breonna Taylor, depends completely on how violet the drug dealer is. Non-violent drug dealers, there isn't a number. But as the drug dealer gets more violent it requires fewer.
Exactly. But you're still evading by hiding behind a TV Crime Drama trope. How many dealers are "violent"? Have you researched that? While there is violence in the drug trade, as there pretty much has to be in any black market, there is almost none at the level of individual sales. Needless to say it's not a good business model to go around killing people in front of your customers.
I mean, the evidence in question (that got this woman killed!) is that a known dealer apparently walked out of the apartment. With a FedEx box. Do we really want to be shooting people for carrying boxes?
The idea of street dealers being dangerous is largely a fiction invented by society. And we're killing innocent people to perpetuate it.
There's books written about this (Outliers?)
I would imagine dealers are 0.1-1% of the population (say .3%) and the FBI says roughly 13% of homicides are gang related which is probably a rough proxy for the number of drug dealer related homicides.
This would put dealers as having a homicide rate approximately 40x the base rate. This seems right to me.
To be fair, have to measure folks in the same socioeconomic class and geography but not in gangs and compare?
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.