Saying that police officers need special legal exemptions to protect themselves from the people they’re sworn to protect and serve is like saying America needs to redouble its efforts to protect itself from Afghanistan. In both cases a certain confusion is at work. From John Whitehead at rutherford.org:
There is one criminal justice system for citizens—especially black and brown ones—and another for police in the United States.”—Redditt Hudson, former St. Louis police officer
President Trump needs to be reminded that no one is above the law, especially the police.
Unfortunately, Trump and Jeff Sessions, head of the Justice Department (much like their predecessors) appear to have few qualms about giving police the green light to kill, shoot, taser, abuse and steal from American citizens in the so-called name of law and order.
Between Trump’s pandering to the police unions and Sessions’ pandering to Trump, this constitutionally illiterate duo has opened the door to a new era of police abuses.
As senior editor Adam Serwer warns in The Atlantic, “When local governments violate the basic constitutional rights of citizens, Americans are supposed to be able to look to the federal government to protect those rights. Sessions has made clear that when it comes to police abuses, they’re now on their own. This is the principle at the heart of ‘law and order’ rhetoric: The authorities themselves are bound by neither.”
Brace yourselves: things are about to get downright ugly.
By shielding police from charges of grave misconduct while prosecuting otherwise law-abiding Americans for the most trivial “offenses,” the government has created a world in which there are two sets of laws: one set for the government and its gun-toting agents, and another set for you and me.
No matter which way you spin it, “we the people” are always on the losing end of the deal.
If you’re a cop in the American police state, you can now break the law in a myriad of ways without suffering any major, long-term consequences.
Indeed, not only are cops protected from most charges of wrongdoing—whether it’s shooting unarmed citizens (including children and old people), raping and abusing young women, falsifying police reports, trafficking drugs, or soliciting sex with minors—but even on the rare occasions when they are fired for misconduct, it’s only a matter of time before they get re-hired again.
To continue reading: Anything Goes When You’re a Cop in America
We need more of this