By Steve Pomper
A recent social media post I received, inserted below, is instructive when attempting to navigate the truly stupid “police reform” laws, which rode in on the coattails of disastrous “defund the police” politics. After suffering through so many inane media comments from radical leftists, it always grounds me to get a dose of commonsense my cop friends insert into the nonsense.
In a recent thread regarding Washington State’s Democrat-supported “police reform” laws, a commander with a local law enforcement agency asked a simple question, alluding to a recent true incident, about how the new laws affected responding police officers. But, because of the new laws, the question is no longer simple. Well, you be the judge. I’ll paraphrase:
I have a question for my esteemed currently employed colleagues and my retired mentors: A call comes out of a murder in a parking lot of a business. It’s 2245 hours (10:45 p.m.) and the business is closed.
The parking lot is empty, and the witnesses’ suspect description is a white male, 20s-30s, wearing jeans and a “Free Britney” tee-shirt. You pull up as the first officer and see a subject—the only subject in the parking lot, by the way—sprinting away from the location of the murder.
He’s a white male, about 20-30, wearing jeans and a Free Britney T-shirt. You order him to stop running, but he continues to run away from you. You get out of your car and chase him. You catch up to him, yell, “stop!” but he still refuses to stop running.
Here’s the question: Given the new law of the land, HB 1310, can you use force to detain him? Ready…GO!
Can you believe where we’ve come to in America that cops even have to consider such a question? But the radical Democrats have brought this insanity to our daily lives.
There are two immediate issues here. First is how the new law inhibits, or at least confuses, officers, trying to enforce the law and protect their communities. Second is having to have this discussion at all, which will cause officers to hesitate—and hesitation is an officer’s worst enemy.
Here, we have a high-ranking officer, worried about his or her cops who have to work within these obstructive laws, actually asking officers this question at a roll call. Based on these new laws, cops are finding it difficult to discern the Left’s new definitions for the reasonable suspicion or probable cause that would allow cops to use even minimal physical force when necessary.
Reasonable suspicion used to be the lower standard an officer had to meet to stop a person and investigate minimal suspicious behavior. The “Terry Stop” is based on a SCOTUS ruling called, Terry v. Ohio. It allows officers to stop a person, pat them down for weapons, and speak to them about the suspicious activity (the infamous “stop and frisk”) they were exhibiting.
Probable Cause is a higher standard where officers determine the likelihood that a person is committing or has committed a crime and can be arrested.
To interject a lighter note, my partner and I used to ponder a mythical standard we called “possible cause.” Irreverent cop humor that would probably get us fired today if the wrong person heard it. However, the left has done a criminal justice U-turn, and these laws have given officers a new standard: impossible cause.
But the new laws (more than a dozen) have muddied the already murky waters. And it’s not just the new laws but the existing “prosecutors” who are interpreting the laws to benefit the criminals and not the cops or citizens they’re supposed to protect. All the benefit of the doubt goes to the criminals and not the cops.
Recently, my esteemed NPA colleague Chief Joel Shults wrote about Suffolk County (Boston) DA Racheal Rollins, a Soros-funded (non) prosecutor. This social justice warrior rode into office on a list of crimes she would not prosecute.
Chief Shults, regarding Rollins’ lengthy memo about “justice” wrote, “Rollins’ 66-page memo devotes a half page to victims.” And here I thought justice for crime victims is what the criminal justice system is primarily about.
Back in Washington State, one of the new laws reads, “It is the fundamental duty [of officers] to preserve and protect all human life.” I’m sorry, but it’s not. An officer’s fundamental duty is to preserve and protect innocent human life.
This is not to say officers are not obligated to attend to wounded suspects, but an officer’s primary duty is to protect victims from predators. The predators have placed their wellbeing at jeopardy by their evil behavior.
But this playing with definitions and expectations shouldn’t surprise us. These are the same laws that require officers to defer to less-than-lethal weapons such as firing beanbag projectiles rather than firearms. However, these laws also bar officers from using “military-style weapons.” Like the weapons that shoot beanbags. Oops!
Here’s another example of the legislature placing the lives of violent offenders above officers and victims. “It is the intent of the legislature that when practicable, peace officers will use the least amount of physical force necessary to overcome actual resistance under the circumstances.” Hey, Democrat legislators. It’s not supposed to be a fair fight. The cops must win every time.
Do any cops want to be in court after they’ve risked their lives to take down a violent felon, and have a bunch of social justice ignoramuses decide whether the force you used was the “least amount necessary?” What was wrong with, “reasonable?” Doesn’t this move the deliberations into quantitative from qualitative? Was the “lease amount necessary” three or four punches? Three, you’re in the clear, four, you go to prison.
This nebulous language is similar throughout the “police reform” laws. And that’s a part of the trick. Cops can look at the text and think, oh, I used the least amount of physical force necessary…. But how will civilian review boards and Soros-inspired prosecutors interpret those texts? What if the “least amount of physical force necessary” results in the suspect being seriously injured or killed? Let the second-guessing begin.
These civilian review boards and non-prosecutors already defer to the defendants. What will be their reactions to a broken suspect who’d assaulted a cop and that cop having to overcome the resistance? How easy will it be for them to “prove” the officer’s force was not the “least amount necessary?” And they won’t care about the officer’s injuries. It’s just a part of the job, right?
Let’s close with this item from Washington’s new laws that I’ve already seen stretched beyond recognition as if it were Silly Putty. “‘Totality of the circumstances’ means all facts known to the peace officer leading up to and at the time of the use of force and includes the actions of the person against whom the peace officer uses such force, and the actions of the peace officer.”
This type of language has already been used to question the legitimate actions of some cops, primarily by accusing officers of actions they assert made the use of force more likely. Essentially, cop-haters blaming the cops for criminals “escalating” the violence based on after-the-fact interpretations of the officer’s actions. Did the officer pulling out his or her handcuffs “provoke” the suspect? You tell me. I don’t know anymore.
In 1992, my instructors in the police academy told us, “Don’t worry about getting into trouble. As long as you’re honest and acting in good faith, you’ll be fine.” Today, this is simply a quaint, outdated notion disregarded by anti-police politicians and activists.