Cities should not be able to pass more restrictive weapons laws than the state’s laws. It’s absurd that I can legally carry a knife in Annapolis or other areas and then it’s a crime if I carry it to Baltimore.
However, it’s equally absurd to accuse the police of murder and kidnapping if the arrest was valid in accordance with the (silly) laws they are supposed to be enforcing.
Agreed (at least with respect to the kidnapping/false arrest charges - with respect to the murder/negligent homicide charges, let's see what the rest of the evidence says). It's an unconstitutional law, but if it's on the books and hasn't been ruled unconstitutional by the courts, it's hard to imagine convicting the officers for enforcing it.
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I'm not sure that I agree with you.
Cops are a necessary evil in society. Once you are in the custody of a cop or any entity of the state you should be protected from harm. Any cop that abuses any citizen should have the logic applied to child abusers who are in a position of authority over a child like teachers and parents. The penalty should be much higher because the child has a reasonable expectation to be able to trust the abuser when in their care.
In our society it is not illegal to run away from a cop just because our eyes meet. It is not legal for a cop to stop a person without reasonable expectation that the person being stopped committed a crime. We don't have random search and stop sites because we are supposed to be safe in our personal space. Certainly our pockets are part of our personal space.
It would have been wiser for Gray to say don't search me until you get a search warrent but that likely didn't happen and he had been stopped many times in the past. The fact that he had been unlawfully stopped and searched so many times in the past gives him a pretty good reason for running.
There has been much made about the number of arrests of Mr. Grey. I do not make so much of those arrests because nearly all of them were dismissed, in other words Mr. Grey was a victim of harassment by the cops.
In Mr. Gray's community it is not unusual to be busted for drugs. Being busted for drugs should really be a civil charge instead of criminal but the cops use what they have to harass citizens.
To me a cop who harasses any person should not be a cop. Public safety is the cops job not punishment for past offenses. I don't know all the facts in this case, I do know enough however that regardless of the circumstances Mr. Gray should not be dead, even if he had been carrying 20 guns. If Mr. Gray had taken a couple of swings at the cops or spit on them, once SAFELY in police custody he should be able to reasonably expect safety not revenge.