This is one of the most important stories of the year. Attorney General Matt Denn admitted that the main reason why no officers were charged in the shooting death of Jeremy McDole was b/c the law enabling police to shoot first and face no consequences is so broadly written that it’s virtually impossible to charge police in any shooting. From the News-Journal article:
Denn’s decision didn’t rest solely on the facts of the case. Hamstringing the AG’s efforts was that Jeremy “Bam” McDole was killed in Delaware, a state that essentially immunizes law enforcement officers from criminal responsibility when they use deadly force in response to a perceived threat.
Here, a police officer doesn’t have to prove the use of deadly force was “actually necessary to protect the officer against death or serious physical injury,” according to the recent state Department of Justice report. “All (the officer) must show is that he believed that to be the case at the time that he used deadly force, whether that belief was reasonable or unreasonable.”
So, am I missing anything here? If an officer states that they ‘believed’ there was a threat, even if no other reasonable person would believe such a thing, he can shoot at will and w/o fear of consequence. When you couple that with the fact that cops can basically take possessions from people who they ‘believe’ may have committed an offense (civil forfeiture), what recourse through the justice system does an ordinary citizen (if they haven’t already been shot dead by a cop) have? BTW, raise your hand if you believe that no cop who has seized stuff has ever pocketed it or sold it. Didn’t think so.
You can tell that Denn is pissed off, and good for him. He points fingers at the City and specifically at one officer:
The AG’s report not only sheds light on the considerations underlying prosecutorial decisions. In an unusual move, Denn called for reforms to Wilmington Police Department training procedures, noting “serious deficiencies” in how officers are prepared to handle such crisis situations.
Denn also recommended in the report that one of the officers involved in the incident, Senior Cpl. Joseph Dellose, be stripped of his gun. That angered local police union representatives, who accused Denn, a career civil servant with no direct police experience, of overstepping his authority to advance his political objectives.
“From the outset, this was clearly politically motivated,” Sgt. Harold Bozeman, Wilmington Fraternal Order of Police president, said in a statement. “The elected attorney general of this state has used this tragedy as a vehicle to cajole voters in his re-election and much-speculated eventual ascendance to the governor’s mansion.
Bozeman’s statement demonstrates the arrogance of the police. Pissing off the cops hardly advances one’s career political objectives, especially as AG, and he knows it. You will also note that Bozeman doesn’t defend the cop, just tries to smear the AG.
The excellent News Journal story by Margie Fishman and Matthew Albright goes on to recount how Delaware’s law, which is an outlier, has been deemed unconstitutional by the U. S. Supreme Court. Read the whole damn thing.
I give Denn major props for drawing attention to this, and for helping pave the way for a civil suit. But this case essentially demands a U. S. Department of Justice investigation and filing of charges against these officers.
One thing for certain: The police won’t police themselves:
Local and state police union representatives fear that extra layers of regulation could have disastrous consequences for officers on the ground.
“How now do you expect us to do our jobs? said Fred Calhoun, state FOP president. “We have created a society that thinks that by creating policy they can dictate the outcome of someone’s future…If we could do that, we wouldn’t need the police.”
Let me first point out that the ‘extra layers of regulation’ would in fact be the removal of ill-conceived extra protections for cops enacted in our disastrous “Police Bill of Rights”. In other words, no longer would police be completely above the law.
And if police weren’t above the law, we wouldn’t ‘need’ the 4th Amendment. The ongoing actions of police in our police state are evidence that we do.