The Breonna Taylor Law Will Ban No-Knock Warrants in Louisville, Ky. SO WHAT! WE DON’T WANT TOKEN, TOOTHLESS LAWS. WE DEMAND REAL POLICE REFORM NOW.
BANNING CHOKEHOLDS & NO-KNOCK WARRANTS MEANS NOTHING BECAUSE POLICE CAN STILL VIOLATE THEM AND KILL SOMEONE WITHOUT GOING TO JAIL OR BEING SUED BECAUSE OF QUALIFIED IMMUNITY.
END IT! AND ALLOW CRIMINAL & CIVIL PENALTIES AGAINST ROGUE COPS. WHY SHOULD THE TAXPAYING CITIZENS HAVE TO SHELL OUT MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR SETTLEMENTS FOR POLICE BRUTALITY?
The FBI does not collect data on police shootings in America. So, Stinson’s Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database is among the best sources available on prosecutions of police, between 2005 and 2014.
Updating this data is difficult and time-consuming, but Stinson was able to send us more recent data for prosecutions resulting from on-duty police shootings, between 2005 and 2014.
In fact, Stinson has found only 110 law enforcement officers nationwide have been charged with murder or manslaughter in an on-duty shooting — despite the fact that around around 1,000 people are fatally shot by police annually, according to a database maintained by The Washington Post.
Furthermore, only 42 officers were convicted. 50 were not and 18 cases are still pending. And as the table below shows, many of these convictions ended up being for a lesser offense — only five of these officers were convicted of murder (and did not have that conviction overturned).
| CHARGE | NUMBER OF CONVICTIONS |
| Manslaughter | 11 |
| Involuntary manslaughter | 6 |
| Murder* | 5 |
| Voluntary manslaughter | 5 |
| Federal criminal deprivation of civil rights | 5 |
| Official misconduct | 3 |
| Negligent homicide | 3 |
Only 110 officers were charged since 2005. Yet police average about 1000 fatal shootings a year this does not include killings without guns. That’s over 15,000 police killings since 2005. The reason that number of officers facing charges is so low is because of qualified immunity.
The U.S. Supreme Court first introduced the qualified immunity doctrine in Pierson v. Ray (1967), enacted during the height of the civil rights movement, it is stated to have been originally enacted with the rationale of protecting law enforcement officials from frivolous lawsuits and financial liability in cases where they acted in good faith in unclear legal situations.
Starting around 2005, courts increasingly applied the doctrine to cases involving the use of excessive or deadly force by police, leading to widespread criticism that it “has become a nearly failsafe tool to let police brutality go unpunished and deny victims their constitutional rights.”
To end or substantially reduce police brutality, we must end qualified immunity. Only Congress can do that. Politicians are deathly afraid of police unions. We must make them more afraid of us than the police. They work for us.
We also must have a national standard of policing. There are 18,000 police departments and they all have their own operating procedures. And we should have the FBI establish a database to track violence by police. This will preclude rogue police officers from moving from department to department committing heinous acts of brutality. This will be the beginning of real police reform.
by TOMTHUNKIT™
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