'The fatal and thoroughly needless police shooting of Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta makes it harder to counter the growing 'Defund the Police' movement, which argues not for reform but for largely replacing armed law enforcement.' (via latimesopinion)
Brooks was a 27-year-old Black father of four who fell asleep in his car at a Wendy’s drive-through. Officers arrived and asked him to move to a parking space, which he did. Perhaps that could have been the end of it, although it appeared that Brooks was intoxicated. Letting him sleep it off in his parked car might have been fine, but letting him drive home would not — and the officers could not know if he would attempt to drive home once they left.
So they did the traditional police job — they administered a sobriety check, which Brooks failed, and they . Authorities say he resisted, took an officer’s Taser and began to run, and one of the officers shot him in the back.cousin described her wearing her birthday dressFirst, do no harm. That ancient ethical principle for physicians ought to apply equally to police, whom citizens employ not to rule over them but to protect them. As a society, we have a duty to resolve noncriminal problems without escalating them. Being drunk and asleep in a drive-through lane is not a capital offense.
A broad reimagining of public safety might mean dispatching somebody other than an armed, uniformed police officer when a man asleep in his car is holding up fast-food orders. Might it be some health or community service official who would have no problem calling the man’s family or driving him home, and then following up the next day to check on his condition? Perhaps on Saturday such a person would have been invited in for a joyous party and a slice of birthday cake.
The defund movement argues that no police officer could perform such a task, because anyone with a weapon and the state-sanctioned power over others that it represents will eventually use it. Police are sometimes needed to keep the peace, and not just to respond to crime, but it’s fair to ask why police involvement so often means that someone’s going to jail — or someone’s going to die — when a different outcome was possible.
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