Policing Laws Need to Change

I'm reading an article that discusses the rare conviction of officers when something like murder has been committed. You can read about Njeri Rutledge's article entitled The entire country needed a guilty verdict in Chauvin case. But laws still need to change. The article has some great points and prompts our national leadership to think long and hard about what immunity from criminal behavior means in law enforcement (not to mention how this might turn out a few years, or a decade, later if a couple more recorded and publicized issues occur). 

Let me say I am 100% for law enforcement and 100% for reform. I know their value to society and the community. Most departments focus on what is right and love to help others. Reform is about raising that value of the profession by increasing trust and integrity of the institution so that it better ensures its effectiveness and capacity to recruit from a wider base of talent. 

Laws are subjective by nature and how they are applied often determines their forthrightness to the people that live by them. Enforcing the law with those who enforce it, is highly important for integrity and validity. To fix this problem might require some changes in policing and prosecution practices. More regulations are unlikely to improve the situation until we install ethics in all behaviors and cultural artifacts (psychological and physical) of the field (A couple of recommendations in Oaths and Ethics).

I've met so many awesome officers that are willing to do the right thing. They are forced to make split second decisions over dangerous situations on a regular basis (mistakes will happen). The vast majority would only shoot in the worst situations where they feel themselves or someone else is under threat. Trigger happy sadists should not be on this force; or any other force where lethal capacity exists. 

I'm not talking about those who make natural mistakes in the course of their dangerous jobs. For them training and new non lethal weapons might be useful (We might want to develop a line for use domestically and/or internationally in peace keeping missions. I wonder if clustering businesses to tackle this issue might be helpful? 🤔). Who I'm talking about are those who never had the right personality for policing in the first place and are well known to lack integrity or good judgement.

This is something I've experienced in real life and in real time action. The involved officer wasn't making a mistake, they knew what they were doing, and were reinforcing their fundamental beliefs/identity within their social network. That social network also has a history of bullying others and contains within it the propensity for hate based behaviors and coordinated intimidation. It just took the right self-consumed personality to light and then throw the match.

That officer is already forgiven because I understand the difficulty of their background (Broken home, low self-esteem displayed as arrogance, the need to feel better than others, always putting others down, aggressive personalities when alcohol removes inhibitions, etc... all the signs of a pained soul. ). While mental health help for officers is important, we also must consider laws that ensure intentional violators of sound moral judgement are removed from the force to protect the public. We just have to decide what the essential purpose of policing is and move to adjust our policies to create a healthier organism in closer alignment with shared American values. There is no good reason why we don't remove bad officers and remove barriers for good officers (from an HR perspective). 

Changes by wiser minds that understand the bigger picture likely coming. You can read about Attorney General Merrick Garland launching investigation policing practices....HERE

The solutions are simple but changing the egos is hard! There should be no politics in this at all. 😢 There are no more blind eyes.