But anybody who runs from the police is a damn fool.
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I’d say he wasn’t running from the police , he was running from our debtors prison system... he had an arrest warrant out on him because he couldn’t pay a bill... he knew he had no money for a legal defense and that none would be provided him because of how the “justice” system games this infraction , a “civil” infraction that carries a “criminal” penalty ... IF IT HAS A CRIMINAL PENALTY THEN THE MAN DESERVES COUNSEL ...
Really? I’d say he was running from the cop he had just been fighting with and whose taser he had grabbed, thus prompting the cop to draw his gun on him. He was running from the concrete threat of a cop about to shoot him, not the remote concept of debtors prison.
You hit the nail on the head. The central problem is the network of infractions with excessive penalties that is designed to escalate to the use of force.
Problem 1 is that a person is being pulled over for a broken tail light. It was daytime. Doesn’t that officer have something better to do with his time? No, he doesn’t, because he’s got a revenue quota and this is one of the ways of meeting it. If not for the fact of a broken tail light, Walter Scott would still be alive. This is a mind-blowingly perverse situation.
Problem 2 is that a man can go to jail for not being able to pay court-ordered child support. I could not imagine a less constructive policy; a man in jail is not able to work to pay down the sum, and giving him a criminal record makes it substantially more difficult to do that as well. At this point in history we are supposed to understand that debtors’ prisons are barbaric and not useful.
Problem 3 is that it’s not obvious to all that a man scared to be arrested for not paying child support when he simply doesn’t have the capacity to pay shouldn’t be gunned down if he runs away from a taser. Willingly standing still to be tasered is not a normal human reaction so that can’t reasonably be expected of the victim.
He sure ain’t paying down that child support or fixing that tail light now, which is empirical evidence that present predominant paramilitary policing practices as applied under an already-large and ever-increasing body of criminal law is taking bad situations and making them worse, rather than leading to better outcomes.