If people accept that some uses of violent force are not "going too far", human biases toward justifying one's own actions will tend towards supporting the belief that every shooting they commit is a justified shooting, and their supporters will tend to follow this same line of logic. But by treating every police use of deadly force as "going too far", at least initially, you force a critical examination of every incident and prevent the out-of-hand dismissal of any shooting as "justified" until it can be validated. As a result of the initial assumption that any police shooting is unjustified, you present police with the obligation to not escalate, and to attempt to defuse situations first rather than shooting. And if a shooting is viewed as unjustified until it is investigated thoroughly and with a critical eye, and treated as a failure of the officer even when it was unavoidable, you create reflection on the actions which will, hopefully, prevent further shootings.
We could expand that logic to other areas. Like, let's treat all shoppers as shoplifters. Or all drivers as drunks driving stolen cars.
you just made a bald assertion. Please provide the underlying principle which would extrapolate to that position, an follow through the extrapolation, and the justification for the claim of analogically compatibility between those situations. Or admit you are straw-manning my position. Or be harangued for the rest of the thread for your failure to defend or retract. Seriously, I wish there was a forum rule which would allow someone to throw down on bullshit like this!
So yeah, I agree with those who hold the belief that no shooting is justified. Otherwise, we end up where we are, in where by acknowledging a priori that some shootings are OK, people are too quick to assuage their application of force with the platitude that this can be one of those, and not examining it further.
But reality is not only that some police shootings are justified, but a large majority of them are.
You and Gillum are free to hold this ridiculous "presumption of guilt and even if innocent, it's still a 'failure'" position, but you can't do so and at the same time pretend you are not anti-police.
You have yet to back your claim that police shootings are in large part, majority, or even in significant percentages, justified. Though to be honest, I don't think that matters game-theoretically; the consequences of accepting up front that shootings are justified allows unacceptable false-positives, in that police enter and continue their jobs with the expectation that it is dangerous and sometimes violent work; normal civilians who they shoot, however, have made no such consent to exposure to such danger in their lives; rather, they just get shot and die because a cop gets froggy without any say in the matter.
As to your implication that my position is that they should see legal consequences, this is ridiculous. There are many legally-agnostic (non-judicial) situations where a presumption of guilt is the default correct position, and this is one of them. Let them be innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, sure, but let them be guilty until proven innocent in the realm of "do we let them continue holding a gun and badge, and holding additional powers over the citizenry?"
The difference is that one determines sanctions against someone as a citizen, and the other determines sanctions against someone as a servant of the public trust. For the record, I feel the same way about representatives and judges. Let them be a free citizen, and legally bar any action not validly tied to the circumstances of the doubt of their character, but do not continue extending a seat in a high place above the rest of us, as such a seat requires a person beyond such reproach.
