I awoke one morning prior to work like any other this week, but this morning CNN's headline featured video of a man running away from an officer while the officer fired eight shots into the man's back. Granted, I did not see what happened before the incident, but what I witnessed seemed very clear to me to be murder, regardless of the races involved in the incident. Generally, police policy would only be to wound or kill a human being in this manner justifiably if the suspect presented immediate and grave danger to society, this was a man whom didn't have insurance on his vehicle and was trying to escape $16,000 in child support, hardly fitting the former definition for justifiable homicide in the line of duty. Recently, we have seem many officer involved shootings in the news, especially ones that involve white officers and black suspects as this is a very polarizing issue between different segments of American culture. With the proliferation of cellphones with video cameras, we're seeing more and more videos of citizens recording police officers in the line of work, including the one I've cited above. We're finding out with these headlines that numbers of officers killed is kept (FBI.gov), but records of suspects being killed by officers is much harder to come by and isn't really recorded as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is trying to change that into statutory law. As I finished chapter 4 of our text yesterday, David Hume's Emotionalism struck an accord with me as it resonated with me that many officers in their daily dealings may lose their ability of compassion and feelings of empathy with the suspects they deal with. As Hume explains that the good and the bad only lie in our feelings toward the act, not whether it is objectively right or wrong, even murder. I fear that certain police officers, especially the one involved in this particular shooting in South Carolina, may in the line of their duty, be desensitized and have their emotionalism be eroded into "good" feelings about murder in their daily duties. I too fear that with the increased militarization of police forces that citizens are being viewed as combatants rather than, well, citizens. This coupled with the fact that some officers may have a paradigm in the erosion of their compassion and empathy of others and citizens viewed as combatants, we may have a major societal issue as police forces are required to serve the community as a police force, not a military force. In conclusion, with the possible erosion of compassion and empathy of police officers in their line of work, coupled with more militarization and exacerbated by no database to track police officer related shootings, we many continue to see these incidents in the news more often with the proliferation of cellphone cameras.
References
Rosenstand, N. (2013). Myself or Others? In The Moral to the Story (7th ed., pp. 204-206). New York, New York: McGraw-Hill.
Harshaw, P. (2015, March 5). America needs a reliable death-by-police database. Retrieved April 12, 2015, from http://fusion.net/story/57901/america-needs-a-reliable-death-by-police-database/
FBI Releases 2012 Statistics on Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted. (2013, October 28). Retrieved April 12, 2015, from http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-releases-2012-statistics-on-law-enforcement-officers-killed-and-assaulted
Fantz, A., & Yan, H. (2015, April 9). South Carolina officer charged with murder - CNN.com. Retrieved April 12, 2015, from http://www.cnn.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-officer-charged-with-murder/
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