We need legislation -- state and national -- to change police policy on discharging firearms/use of lethal force. Unless we change the laws, police will continue to fatally shoot suspects whom they "believe" to have a gun. Here are two principles and six changes proposed by Terrie L. Robinson (Twitter @IAspire) to the Sacramento City Council:
Two Principles
1. “Reasonable belief” shall no longer be enough for a
police officer to shoot an unarmed person when the only people who are
potentially in danger of harm are police officers. Police officers should not
be allowed to shoot anyone without actually seeing a gun or a knife in the
suspect’s hand, instead of “reasonably believing” that the suspect has a gun or
a knife, because “reasonable belief” can be colored by unconscious racial bias.
2. If there is a risk of imminent danger of death or serious
bodily harm to a police officer, the risk of error should fall to the officer
who assumed the risk of putting his or her life on the line, not citizens.
Officers' lives are not more important than citizens' lives.
Six Changes
1. Justification for the use of deadly force when only an
officer or officers are at risk of death or serious bodily injury shall be
limited to facts known by the officer or officers at the time, not facts
reasonably perceived by the officer. In such situations, officers shall only
discharge their firearm if they can visibly see that a suspect has a firearm.
2. Turning off or muting a police body camera before,
during, or after a pursuit of a suspect is evidence tampering. It shall be a
fireable offense and considered prima facie evidence of guilt in civil
proceedings, i.e., wrongful death and civil rights cases involving
officer-involved shootings of citizens.
3. Every police officer shall be required to take an
“Implicit Associations Test” (IAT), available for free on the Project Implicit
website, to test for unconscious racial and other biases that may affect their
judgment in a deadly force situation. The results of those tests shall be
revealed to the officers and placed in the personnel files.
4. Pending conclusion of any investigation of an officer
shooting of a suspect, the suspect’s arrest and conviction record shall not be
made public so as not to bias the investigation or a jury pool in a civil
proceeding against a police department.
5. There shall be no confidential settlements of wrongful
death or civil rights cases involving officer-involved fatal shootings of
suspects. The facts from any wrongful death or civil rights case should be laid
bare to the public hold the police department accountable.
6.
Police shootings of suspects shall be investigated by an independent body whose
composition shall be a majority of non-law enforcement citizens.
