Please read my last post on eliminating police unions so that police can be held accountable to upholding the highest standards of justice. I am taking for a given that the police force described in this post earnestly strives for justice.
Police forces will always be vastly outnumbered by the general population. Therefore, police cannot engage in “fair fights”. If they do so, they will eventually be seriously hurt or killed.
A suspect may only have a confrontation with a police officer once every few years. His risk is low. A police officer will have confrontations daily. His risk is very high.
A police officer must enter every fight with a subject with every possible advantage.
First, our culture must build in strict obedience to a police officer’s commands. This the best way to avoid fights that could lead to the death of the suspect or the officer.
Second, if a suspect resists or fights the police officer, the police officer needs to have the right to use overwhelming force to immediately end the fight.
Ideally, a police officer would use commensurate force and would avoid deadly force if possible. But in the rapidly changing circumstances of a physical fight, the police officer may not know whether the suspect is armed, or if the suspect is ready to fight to the death, or if the suspect has allies nearby the police officer is unaware of.
The police officer also does not know of preexisting conditions the suspect may have that could cause a routine use of a Taser or a chokehold to accidentally cause the death of the suspect.
A police officer must be allowed to use the force necessary to end a violent confrontation. This includes any form of a chokehold, any type of nonfatal weapons, and even the use of fatal weapons.
If a police officer misuses force, he should be held accountable afterwards in a court of law and should not have union protection. A police officer should be given the benefit of the doubt as a person who is forced to engage in regular violent battles with criminals who have no rules of engagement.
No one would ever become a police officer if they knew that when they entered a fight with a criminal, that the criminal had no rules of engagement whereas they themselves had to follow strict limitations. Police officers would be injured and killed left and right.
The police are necessary to curb the worst of people. There are many individuals who only avoid hurting the innocent out of fear of the police and other consequences. If you remove this fear of the police from criminals, then murder and rape and theft and arson will become a common occurrence and we will all live in fear. When that happens, untrained and wild vigilantes and militias take over, and mob justice will kill people for minor crimes and true criminals will gain power. We must have a good police force.
One final note is that a citizen considering how to uphold justice and build a happy society should look at data and not anecdotes such as single news stories. In a country of 400 million citizens, you can find an anecdotal news story any given day to support the narrative that all police mistreat minorities or find a news story of a minority committing a crime supporting a prejudiced viewpoint (Fox News highlights the worst minority crimes daily, trying to fuel racism in America). It is important to look past these anecdotal news stories and seek the truth in data and statistics.