Quote:
Originally Posted by CRedskinsRule
Police brutality - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The whole article is very interesting, and various numbers and statistics provide reasons to be cynical.
I tried to find some sort of statistic that showed the statement "But police kill people a lot in this country" from djnemo65 to be factual, but couldn't. Partly, it depends on your definition of "a lot".
Googling "police brutality statistics" gives several interesting articles.
|
It was an anecdotal claim, one that can't be verified with statistics since those types of statistics aren't kept by the DOJ. Even if they were, you can't qualify "a lot" as "factual" since it's a relative term.
Anyway, the issue is not the incidence of police violence in this country (which I'm guessing falls somewhere between Denmark and Zaire, although I don't know and neither do you) but rather the acquittal rate of police officers accused of excessive violence, often in spite of inculpating evidence. Again, speaking anecdotally, the police have walked with little to no punishment in almost every case I can remember. I found it particularly illustrative that, in this case, in which a video and witness testimony appear to be pretty damning for the officer, you have taken it upon yourself to be this cop’s Jonny Cochran - questioning the credibility of the video and witness and everything but the officer himself. I think in such a case as this it is important that we hold the officer to the same standards we hold other citizens. While we all accept the officer’s right to use lethal force when necessary, this comes with limits, and in this case they appear to have been breached.