Law-and-order-centric individuals claim to conjure logic and common sense when they declare that “if you don’t want to get shot by police, don’t mouth off to a police officer”, which highlights the strange infestation that we grew up accepting – namely that it’s acceptable for the punishment for certain acts to be field execution by police officers, with no trial and no due process.

We in the US are somehow OK with the notion that one deserves to be killed instantly for things like yelling at a police officer, running away from a police officer, reaching into your glove compartment in front of a police officer, not putting your hands where a police officer can see them, and a whole slew of other infractions, some explicitly taught in police academies while others can be left to a police officer’s judgement on the spot.

“An officer has to do whatever they have to do to defend themselves”, say law-and-order-centric people. But to respond with certain death to an uncertain threat essentially and fundamentally implies that the life of a police officer is more valuable than that of his/her victim. For this reason, this mentality of life supremacy is extremely uncommon in other countries.

“Well, criminals have guns and will shoot at police if they can”. Sure, and no one is arguing that a police officer cannot respond to fire with fire, but this is not what’s happening in the US. Here, police officers are responding with overwhelming and excessive lethal force against the least suspicion of a threat, stepping more and more into clear non-threat territory with their lethal force in a way that reveals deep angst, psychological disturbance, and/or a yearning to shoot someone, not a mere need to defend oneself.

And they always get away with lying about it. Isn’t it amazing that police departments predictably get away with lying to the public in their official statements? The videos that eventually surface clearly show that PDs were utterly and knowingly lying, but they never seem to be held accountable for it.

This all has to stop.