If physical force was used the officers involved had to write a Use of Force report that was judged against the standards taught at the academy. We were self-insured on liability, so there were no settlements pushed by an insurance company – we went to court if people didn’t back off. People were ready to sue for just about everything so there months when I spent more time on civil court cases than criminal cases. We didn’t spend enough on defending against civil suits to pay for a month’s premium on the last quote we got from an insurance company for liability insurance, so it was definitely a winning strategy.

To work like it did, people had to know there would be penalties if they screwed up, and there were. There were standards and those standards would be met or else. After a year that was the routine and people did it automatically. No one expected to get away with doctoring reports, so they didn’t. People understood that mistakes could be accepted, but covering up mistakes was never accepted.

What everyone understood was the reality of the time – a large loss would come from our budget which meant pay and job cuts. People understood that.

All major revolutions in modern times have been the result of governments acting as if they were immune from the law. The Magna Carta sort of made it clear that no one is above the law, and people don’t like it when some act as if they are.

There has to be skin in the game. If officers who committed these illegal acts and their immediate chain of command lost a pay grade for every lawsuit the department lost, they might have more incentive to obey the law and to properly supervise their officers. If there was an independent police commission responsible for prosecuting officers who break the law, rather than the district attorney’s office that relies on those same officers’ testimony to put people away, the thought of possible consequences might also reduce the incentive to break the law. But the current situation, where a police officer can break the law with near impunity and never have any real consequences, simply isn’t sustainable in a democracy. In a police state pretending to be a democracy, yes. In a democracy, no.

The officer who was killed had no reason to suspect a weapon because the only thing they wanted to do with the suspect was talk to him. They didn’t know that he had violated the terms of his parole and there was a warrant out on him. A convicted felon is not allowed to have a gun and that would have been an additional charge added to the parole violation, so the suspect was seeing a long stretch in prison without the possibility of parole.

Yeah. There is a right way, and a wrong way. A shame that the right way is generally 2nd, or last place these days.