Collector1337 wrote:mistermack wrote:How long will it be before it becomes a reasonable assumption that the cop is going to shoot you if you're black, and you can then legally fire in self defence?
If you take the race part out of it. And just ask that question in general, for anyone, not a particular race.
It is actually a very valid question that you've raised.
If you know that the police are certain to kill you if you surrender. What is your best course of action?
Seth should chime in on this, minus the Black Panther nonsense.
I think it depends on whether you are a criminal or not. The law requires you to surrender peaceably to an arrest, even if it is not a lawful arrest. A citizen is NOT entitled to resist an arrest, but must surrender and act peaceably and take up the issue of his innocence before the court. If the police did not have probable cause to arrest, then presumably this will come out in court and your liberty will be restored. Resisting arrest, even an unlawful arrest, is its own crime. This is so because the law recognizes that the police don't always have absolute certainty about the guilt of the suspect, nor are they required to. They only need probable cause, which roughly means that it's more likely than not that you have committed a crime, in order to arrest and bring you before the bar of justice, where your innocence is presumed and your guilt will be either proven beyond a reasonable doubt or you will be free to go.
Only in the case where the police are using unlawfully excessive force that you
reasonably believe will
imminently result in your death or serious bodily harm, and you
reasonably believe that a lesser degree force would be inadequate to prevent the unlawful harm, are you even potentially justified in using ANY sort of force to resist the force being used against you, including deadly force. A "lesser degree of force" would
always be deemed to include motionless surrender and non-resistance as a first step in the chain of reasonable belief you need to use deadly force against a police officer attempting to arrest you.
If you surrender peacefully but the police continue to beat you to the point where you reasonably believe you are going to imminently going to be killed or seriously injured, THEN you would likely be justified in using force to resist the
unlawful use of excessive force by the police.
The problem is usually that the arrestee thinks that the force being used is excessive (or in many cases think the arrest itself is wrongful and shouldn't be happening at all) when it's actually not excessive because the arrestee is physically resisting the arrest but either doesn't realize it due to anger, panic or other emotions, or doesn't understand that both verbal and physical actions can be deemed to be resisting arrest which justifies the use of greater degrees of physical force by the police.
The Rodney King incident is a prime example of the
unlawful use of excessive force by the police that most certainly would have justified the use of force, perhaps including deadly force, by the victim
or another person witnessing the beating who was not involved in the situation.
The Eric Gardner incident in New York City is an example of one of those extremely difficult fine-line events that defy clear conclusions. On one hand, the choke hold used was itself out of policy and potentially deadly, and the crime involved (selling loose cigarettes) certainly not serious enough to (in my opinion and the opinion of many others) justify the use of ANY physical force at all, it is also true that Gardner did in fact violently physically resist arrest, and it was HIS actions that triggered the escalation of force by the police. Had he surrendered peacefully the police would not have needed to escalate the force which ultimately resulted in his death.
In other instances, police officers have quite frequently, and in my opinion both negligently and possibly criminally, killed suspects they already have under arrest and
in handcuffs through deliberate or negligent positional asphyxiation which involves leaving handcuffed subjects, particularly those who are overweight or have "beer bellies" lying face-down, which can cause the internal vicera to shift upwards, compromising the diaphragm and the subject's ability to breathe. This may cause the suspect to become agitated and continue to struggle, which the police incorrectly (or deliberately) view as "resistance," causing them to apply more force and weight to the upper chest and neck to "restrain" the subject, which causes greater distress and inability to breathe, which becomes a vicious cycle until the subject becomes unconscious from asphyxiation, at which point the police get off him and ignore him, thinking he's finally submitting peacefully when in fact he is in the process of dying.
The whole issue is so dependent on the precise situation involved that it's impossible to generalize except to say that if the suspect surrenders peaceably he or she is much, much less likely to be injured or killed during the arrest, and that any physical resistance to an arrest, legal or not, is almost always a very, very bad ideal.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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