After months of grand jury deliberations in the case of officer Darren Wilson shooting
teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, the grand jury has decided that Wilson should
not be prosecuted for Brown's death.
A key element in that case, as in all police shootings, all cases involving police use
of force is whether the officer's decision about whether force was warranted was reasonable
or not.
For an officer's deadly force to be legal, he has to have believed that the target of
the force was a threat to his own life, or another innocent person, or that the target
was fleeing from a violent felony.
But the question isn't whether the person being shot actually was a threat.
The question is whether the officer thought he was a threat.
Whether the officer's state of mind at the time of the shooting was reasonable.
And whether that state of mind is enough to support the decision to shoot.
And officers will rely on this defense that in a split second, they did the right thing.
They thought that they were in danger, and they pulled the trigger, and that it's not
reasonable to question that.
And that's a really effective defense.
Even if it turns out that they were wrong.
"Get your hands out, now!"
There are a couple of reasons for that.
People believe that police officers are credible.
Another reason is that citizens are more likely perceive black people as criminals.
Juries are made of citizens.
So that is an advantage for an officer whose legal defense is that he felt threatened by
a black man.
The result is that police can and do kill.
And a disproportionate number of people killed by police are black.
In recent years, young black men have been twenty one times more likely to be shot by
police than white teens are.
Police have to use force in their jobs and they will sometimes have to make a split second
decision.
But over time, cases of police officers making that decision wrong and shooting an unarmed
person because they wrongly perceived them to be a threat keep happening.
These cases keep piling up.
It's time to re-evaluate when we allow police to use force, and what the consequences should
be when they get it wrong.