Also, Regarding "Justified Shootings"

Okay, one last thought about the whole Ferguson thing. As part of their coverage of the Ferguson outrages this week, Vox.com put up a post called, "When is it legal for a cop to kill you?" The idea was to educate people about the law governing police shootings, which is basically that, as a matter of constitutional law, cops may shoot someone to protect their life or the life of a third party (as may anyone else who's in a position to do so), and they may also shoot a suspect fleeing a crime scene if and only if they have probable cause to think the suspect has committed a violent felony. And the main reaction I kept having to reading the article was, okay, but do you have to actually kill the person? Like, we can put on our philosopher's hats and think about when it's morally justified to kill someone, and we might come up with something a lot like these two situations. The first one makes a ton of sense: in a choice between "murderer kills innocent person" and "attempted murderer is killed," you choose option #2 every time (except, maybe, in some sort of action-movie scripted scenario where the attempted murder in question is actually justified for some reason, heh). The second one is a bit tougher to justify given the level of uncertainty that may often be involved, but at the very least we can see why not letting someone you know to be a murderer flee a crime scene has some of the same elements of not letting someone shoot someone else.

But just because killing the person in question might be somewhere above the ethical replacement-level line, that doesn't mean it's the best thing. Ideally you'd manage to both prevent the violence/apprehend the suspect and not kill anyone. Now, I get why it's not a great idea for cops to shoot dudes who point guns at other dudes in the leg. In that circumstance, I get shoot to kill, and honestly, if you point a gun at someone else and make it pretty damn clear you mean to shoot them, you don't have that much of a complaint if someone else shoots and kills you first.* But in the second circumstance? The only possible reason for preferring to shoot a fleeing suspect in the chest is that you're more likely to hit them that way. Stipulating that your bullet will find its target, shooting in the leg accomplishes 100% of what shooting in the chest would, minus the gratuitous killing. Hell, shooting with some sort of stun gun/tranquilizer dart/tazer would accomplish 100% of what shooting to kill would, minus the gratuitous killing.

So basically what I'm saying is, shouldn't there be some kind of narrow tailoring here? Shouldn't there be some effort to minimize the amount of killing that goes on, rather than just saying, "well, I can make a case that killing this person isn't worse than leaving them uninterfered-with, so I'm gonna kill them"? Shouldn't there maybe be a rule that, if you could've chosen a less-likely-to-cause-someone's-death option that would probably have gotten the job done just as well, you weren't exactly "justified" in using the more-likely-to-kill option instead? Maybe that can't be as a matter of law; maybe you shouldn't be sent to jail for such a decision. But shouldn't you, y'know, get fired for it? Or something? One way or another I know that other countries get by without having their police forces shoot so many people dead, so there must be something we could do to have that happen less often here that wouldn't be a disaster. It seems to me like a moral imperative of the first order that we try.


*Of course, there is the ol' grey zone where someone does something that makes it unclear whether they're about to try to shoot someone. Like, for instance, the guy who was shot earlier this week (not in Ferguson, I believe, just elsewhere in America, the Greatest Country Ever or so I'm told) carrying a toy, plastic rifle around a Wal-Mart. Or when someone goes to fish their wallet out of their pocket for ID or whatever and the policeman thinks they're going for a gun. (Because concealed carry doesn't have any downsides whatsoever...) I feel like the balance that an awful lot of police seem to strike in these situations is to basically give complete, 100% priority to protecting their own life, and 0% priority to making sure they don't kill an innocent person. That does not seem like a particularly good balance to me, since they're both, y'know, human beings who aren't in the act of trying to murder anyone. In fact, since the police officer but not the totally random dude off the street has literally signed up to risk their life in defense of the populace, I think there's a valid though by no means slam-dunk argument for giving more weight to not killing totally random innocent dudes than to letting cops protect themselves. But at the very least they've gotta give more weight to that interest than they do now, right?