This article is about the regulation and legislation in place that monitors police force. As pieces of legislation are being put into place in California changing the appropriate use of force from "reasonable" to "necessary," it is important to reflect on what is being done and what could be done to effectively deal with police brutality. Currently There is no national definition of what qualifies as a use of force. It varies across the nation in more than 18,000 agencies, that is if they bother to define it in legal terms at all. We can try and take cues from court cases such as the Graham v. Connor 1989 ruling that states force must be "objectively reasonable." But "objectively reasonable" is a loose term, the key is measuring misconduct, mistreat of people of color, and unjustified violence. Currently there is no national database that measures of police shootings or incidents. The FBI is trying to change that, but the contributions to the database are "entirely voluntary." The Washington Post has had it's own database since 2015 that documents 963 victims in 2016 and 987 in 2017.
By establishing a national definition of force that applies to all officers we will have a system in place so that those who have unjustly used force will no longer have any excuses when they are prosecuted. Changing legislation state by state is ineffective and time consuming, time in which more and more incidents of police brutality and shootings take place. The federal government has national surveys that document almost every aspect of our lives, yet they don't even know the amount of death that their own government employees have caused. By instituting a national data base, we will have a clear idea of how to prevent the past in the present. The shooting of unarmed citizens by an unmonitored law enforcement has happened frequently in our countries history, for example at the Boston Massacre.
https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/30/us/police-use-of-force-legislation/index.html
No comments:
Post a Comment