Without accountability, we have a police state

We've all seen countless stories of police abuse - many more disturbing than this one - in recent days.

I think most people accept that the police deserve the benefit of the doubt.. But what we're seeing is too many agencies wasting that benefit of the doubt by essentially proving the claims of the protesters. This is not new, it is just being more widely filmed.

Police often have a difficult job, but so do soldiers and firefighters and social workers and nurses. Those workers have accountability when they screw up. The benefit of the doubt CANNOT be a blank check. Especially not here. Police without accountability is a police state.

Most would agree that most cops are good cops. There's a saying that nobody hates bad cops more than good cops. But until bad cops are consistently held accountable - ie: systematically and not just when protests erupt - all cops will be tainted.

Police reform - in whatever guise it takes - is the human rights issue of our generation. We have been avoiding dealing with systemic racism for 400 years. Enough's enough.

Baltimore charges help civilized society fight impunity

I’ve read a lot of snotty memes this week supporting impunity. If you’re on social media, you’ve probably seen them: the pictures of black (always all black) men rioting with wording along the lines of “if you don’t want to be killed by police, then all you have to do is not break the law.”

 

I’m sure the people sharing these memes are saints of the law who have never texted while driving or gone 1 mph above 65 on the highway.

Not surprisingly, this was shown to be untrue. Today, the Baltimore prosecutor announced that Freddie Gray didn’t actually commit any crime, before he was arrested and died in police custody.

According to her, his very arrest was illegal in the first place. And that's before his alleged murder.

With charges including second degree murder against thearresting officers, I applaud the prosecutor for striking a blow against impunity by forcing the accused to answer for their actions before the justice system.

Impunity has no place in a civilized society. As this week’s riots illustrated, when law enforcement acts like the law doesn’t apply to them, it makes their job harder by giving license to everyone else to act the same way.