Originally Posted by
Nessie
What was said is that all wrongful shootings are wrong, which is the correct attitude. To be accepting of wrongful shootings is wrong and those who have that attitude are begin absurd.
As for zero defects being a reasonable standard, it is reasonable to set as a target that there are no wrongful shootings by the police. That standard is set and being achieved by police forces all over Europe.
The reason why you do not want no wrongful shootings as a target is because the USA is overwhelmed by the size of the task and cannot face having to admit it is highly unlikely it will be achieved.
Yes, it is something to aim for. I can't see why it has to be fundamentally different from any other workplace health and safety issue - in the UK, police forces have been prosecuted under the Health and Safety at Work act for causing wrongful (accidental) deaths of individuals.
Most police forces in the UK don't wrongfully shoot anyone in any given year
Workplace safety improved in the UK when the approach changed from thinking that accidents were inevitable, to looking at the causes of accidents
and near miss incidents and working out what went wrong in each case, so that the specific failings could be addressed. Of course, for this, you need to collect data and do something with it. So again, the first thing that needs to be done in the US is to quantify the problem. That should be a federal-level set of statistics on all police shootings, broken down by police force, and compared for demographics. As well as this, arrest statistics and stop and search data should be collected and analysed at the federal level to allow poorly-performing police forces to be highlighted and errors to be addressed.
There is indeed going to be a level of wrongful shootings, but until we analyse to see what went wrong in any individual case, and rectify that, we won't be able to reduce them - except by good fortune.
At the moment there seems to be an attitude that because there is no
reliable centralised data on wrongful (or even justified) police shootings, there isn't a problem and that anyway, it's probably a small number which is a price worth paying, and that there is nothing to do about it.
ETA: In other words, whilst there is going to be a rate of wrongful shootings, any
individual incident could have been prevented, and if the problems that allowed that incident to take place are fixed,
the same problem couldn't happen again.