Something wrong with that incident in Washington, DC yesterday when a woman, with an infant in the back seat, drove her car up against one of the many barriers to the White House. The car was immediately surrounded by a host of law officers, weapons drawn. She backed up the car into a police car, and then, under a hail of bullets fired at the car, she took off at high speed toward the Capitol. Officers caught up with her, and firing into the car, killed her. She was unarmed. It is not yet clear, but she might have been deranged.
What appears wrong to me is the fact that the law officers seemingly rushed to kill her. Throughout the incident, she did not seem to be a major threat. The officers could see that she was not firing a weapon at anyone, there was an infant in the car...and unless this was going to be a mother-and-child suicide bombing, it is at least possible that she simply lost her way a bit in and around the barricades.
Thus, to me, the killing of her was too quick. When the car was first surrounded at the White House, why did the law officers not simply shoot the tires out? That would have disabled the car and made it immobile.
I sense that, since 9/11, there may have developed a tendency to see every violent act, and every potentially violent act, as a terrorist act that might spiral up to catastrophic proportion...and perhaps that perspective has caused some law officers, in their zeal to protect us, to lose some of the care they must take not to harm innocent people. Too often recently, innocent people have been mistakenly, unnecessarily, killed by law enforcement. Once is too often.
And even guilty people should not be judged guilty and executed by law officers, unless absolutely necessary to maintain law and order. Even the guilty have rights. We have a very well developed judicial system to determine guilt and to impose punishment. That is not a function of the law officer on the street.
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