ericpetersautos | Naturally, the solution to the problem of police abusing their authority is to hold them less accountable when they do exactly that.
Leave it to “law and order” Republicans such as Texas Sen.
John Cornyn and Rep. Ted Poe to evolve such logic. They have put forth
the Black and Blue – whoops, Back the Blue – act (see here) which would make it harder to sue run-amok law enforcers in civil court to recover damages resulting from actions undeniably illegal – while at the same time imposing more severe
penalties on Mundanes who affront the holy person of a law enforcer
than those imposed on Mundanes who do exactly the same thing.
As regards the first:
So long as the victim – er, perp – was “engaged
in felonies or crimes of violence” (how this it to be determined in the
heat of the moment remains unclear) the law enforcer administering the wood shampoo
or “directory assistance” (beating administered with a phone book in
between the flesh and he nightstick, to keep the bruising down) or some
other such informal technique, will be immunized from subsequent civil
suit by his victim, provided the abuse suffered occurred while the
enforcer was acting in a “judicial capacity.”
Breathtaking.
It is obvious – or should be – that this only encourage
more lawless “street justice” by the enforcers of the law. It will
also encourage more generous application of the law – i.e., of
bogus/trumped-up charges (such as felony “resisting”) in the immediate
aftermath of an otherwise legally unjustifiable beatdown, to immunize
the beaters from the legal consequences of said beatdown.
This GOP act of cop suckage is even better than a
throw-away stiletto – which dirty cops used to keep on hand to leave
adjacent to the bloodied corpse of their victim, so as to justify his
aeration.
That was at least illegal.
Now they won't have to bother.
What these Republican brownshirts – and that term isn’t too strong; if anything, it is too soft – propose to do is legalize objectively criminal conduct,
the conduct to be justified by eructing that the victim was a “law
breaker” and so – presumably – deserved to have more than the legally
prescribed justice meted out to him and – critically – before he has been duly convicted of anything at all.
