I AGREE, AND IF I WERE A MEMBER OF CONGRESS I’D INTRODUCE LEGISLATION BANNING POLICE UNIONS AND ENDING QUALIFIED IMMUNITY FOR GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS: Obama: ‘All Americans should be deeply troubled’ by police shootings.
President Obama said Thursday he shares the “anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling” about this week’s police shootings in Louisiana and Minnesota.
“All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota,” Obama wrote in a Facebook post. “We’ve seen such tragedies far too many times.”
Obama’s first reaction to the shootings was published on the social media site while he was flying on Air Force One to a NATO summit in Poland.
Sterling, a 37-year-old black man, was pinned down by two white police officers and shot dead on Tuesday in Baton Rouge, La. Castile, 32 and also black, was fatally shot by an officer during a traffic stop on Wednesday.
Parts of both incidents were caught on video, but Obama did not say if has viewed the footage.
He declined to comment on the specifics of both cases, but he praised the Justice Department’s decision to investigate the Louisiana shooting. It is also weighing a probe of the Minnesota incident.
The twin shootings stirred nationwide anger about police violence against black men.
I would also, however, remind the Party Of ScienceTM that research indicates that police are actually slower to use lethal force against black suspects.
And for those with a serious interest, read this piece by my University of Tennessee Law School colleague Tom Davies, on how the Framers were much tougher on arresting officers than modern courts are. “Framing-era arrest standards and the Cokean understanding of due process were lost when nineteenth-century state courts relaxed arrest standards to bare probable cause, thereby drastically expanding governmental investigatory powers. The Supreme Court then reinvented search-and-seizure under the Fourth Amendment, and created the modern reasonableness standard, during the early twentieth century. Thus, the authentic history involves lost understandings and drastic doctrinal discontinuities.”