xdarkyrex said:
It's important that our police never become desensitized to their own potential for harming our society or the lives of individuals.
Therein lies the rub. I've known cops, and I've known people that have gone on to
become cops. They're people like you or I. They make lots and lots of mistakes, they have bad days and off days, and they like (and can easily become over-reliant) on those things which allow them to cut corners or make their job a whole lot easier. In this case, that would be tazers. The fact of the matter, though, is that their job, their
duty, is to serve and protect-- protect the peace, protect the people, but even above those,
to discharge these duties by protecting and upholding the integrity of our nation's constitution and body of laws, which one needn't take a very liberal reading of at all to understand that what happened here, though it may have been
justifiable, was in no way
just.
I don't share Maphusio's fervor, but I've always taken to the Jeffersonian line of wariness in the face of authority, and there's no denying that most of America has kind of developed an authority
fetish lately. We seem to be swinging back towards a general posture regarding criminal justice that I thought we had outgrown in the '80s, with the prevalent attitude being "well, they wouldn't have gotten it unless they deserved it," and with much of the opposition being raised by nitpickers who don't know how to pick their battles or compromise with reality and who are far too sanctimonious to be taken seriously. The idea that 'police officer,' like 'politician,' is
not a job like any other, but a
trust, and that their forgivable margin of error should necessarily be far narrower, is plain common sense, but in today's America common sense is regularly lost in the spectacular din of far more extreme and strident voices.
