Aside from that, people who do so are despicable. 20 years is a light sentence. Taking money to put people in situations that could easily become deadly.
Cops kill people on the basis of ludicrous anonymous phone call because they know they'll get away with it when it turns out to be false.
And they like it that way.
There needs to be a few very public cases of entire SWAT teams getting 20 year sentences.
ACAB
If there was open and honest accountability, I don't think people would have as many problems with the police.
The issue is that police operate in extremely high pressure novel situations all the time. Training only goes so far. After that, you're investigating mistakes versus violent intent.
I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
Police mostly act as professional witnesses taking reports and engage in revenue generating law enforcement.
The most high pressure situations they deal with with any regularity involve mediating domestic disputes or wrestling angry drunks.
Police absolutely are not dealing with violent criminals on the daily. And when they do go out of their way to deal with people who many become violent they show up with the kind numerical advantage that would make Stalin proud.
Your average beat cop probably un-holsters their handgun once a month to once a year depending on where and when they patrol. These high stress high stakes split second judgement call situations are not a daily or weekly thing.
>I'm not sure that's easy to do, and I'm certain the public would never accept the finding that a police officer made an honest mistake, and won't be punished, but somebody got killed.
They do accept this and did for decades. The only reason it's no longer being blanked accepted is because the modern media landscape makes it much harder to hide the fact that a huge fraction of these "honest mistakes" were in fact not so honest and not so mistaken.
Basically nobody has a problem with honest mistakes by themselves. What people have a problem with is thug behavior. Spending decades classifying various degrees of thug behavior as honest mistakes is why nobody wants to tolerate honest mistakes.