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Comment by galfarragem | Hacker News Reader

>> If you start prosecuting officers for using deadly force without proper cause I'm sure use of it would drop pretty dramatically.

Or yet more reasonable: police would not care to act. Why act if you can destroy your life and nobody protects you? The proper cause is very subjective and nowadays biased against police officers.

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"not caring to act" would also be a very wrong thing and as one would expect from any other job, they should be fired for not working.

And replaced by whom? We have enough trouble recruiting police officers as it is; it's a thankless, dangerous, ill-compensated, and often literally terrible job.

Add to that the increasingly common perception that, in exchange for doing your best to protect and preserve your community and your society, you're liable to be thrown under the bus by everyone from your own chain of command to the national legislature and executive for purely political reasons - and is it any wonder that more and more police officers are losing their willingness to risk themselves for a society which, from their point of view, no longer has their back but rather looks for any excuse to plant a knife in it?

So basically, what you have is a broken system that neither the police nor the general public are happy about: the police because they worry they will be treated unjustly if they need to exercise deadly force, and the general public because they worry the police might kill them for minor traffic violations.

No, it's a lot worse than that. Twelve percent of the general public, and that heavily concentrated in the Old South states plus a few conurbations almost entirely east of the Mississippi. Too, that twelve percent gives rise to a disproportionately large fraction of violent crime in the United States. These facts together have an amazingly wide range of deleterious effects.

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