We Need To Stop Trusting The Police [View all]

[MrScorpio]

Last Monday, a jury found two former Fullerton, California, police officers not guilty on one charge of excessive force, two of manslaughter, and one of second-degree murder in the beating death of Kelly Thomas. The 2011 altercation, which lead to Thomas’s death five days later, was captured in detail by surveillance cameras and audio from police recorders—on tape, the cops can be seen beating the homeless man mercilessly and Tasing him twice in the face. At one point, Thomas is moaning “Help me dad” as the officers swing their nightsticks at him.

That fairly clear video evidence, along with the activism of Kelly’s father Ron (a former sheriff’s deputy) and the mobilization outraged community, ensured Thomas’s death got a lot more media coverage than the killing of homeless people by police normally do. But the officers are still walking free after beating an unarmed man to death. (In fact, one of them, Jay Cicinelli, already wants his job back.) How does that happen? A great many people in the community are asking that same question—multiple protests against the outcome of the trial this week resulted in 14 arrests

One answer to that question is that the jurors, like most Americans, probably thought that cops are generally almost always right. A Gallup Poll from last month found that 54 percent of respondents had “high” or “very high” amounts of trust in police officers. People think more favorably of cops than they do journalists, politicians, lawyers, or even members of the clergy. The only authority figures more trusted than the police are doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and grade school teachers.

That trust is buttressed by laws that grant cops various kinds of immunity against prosecution. For instance, in 2010, a Seattle cop named Ian Birk shot and killed John T. Williams, a Native American woodcarver, and after the dust settled, a review panel had found that the shooting was unjustified, Birk had resigned from the force, and the city had paid Williams’s family $1.5 million. Yet Birk never faced criminal charges for killing Williams, since under Washington state law prosecutors would have had to prove evidence of “malice or bad faith” on his part when he pulled the trigger.

http://www.vice.com/read/we-need-to-stop-trusting-the-police