Good morning, readers! Let’s get started. First, if you are not already familiar with this news story, please go ahead and head to cnn.com’s law center and take a few moments to read the article. Here’s a direct link to the article: cnn.com news story.
If you live in the Los Angeles area, you might be familiar with stories of police shootings and beatings. These incidents are not very common, but they do make headlines because they are relatively rare, and because they do shock us.
There is no doubt that police officers have extraordinarily difficult jobs. In order to preserve life, an officer must approach each situation with the highest level of awareness. In some cases, an officer will not be able to distinguish a perpetrator and a non-offender until it is too late.
However, as challenging as these situations are, police officers are trained to be able to deal with them. Officers are specially trained to be able to handle high-stress and potentially deadly situations. Indeed, most of these types of situations are averted due to a law enforcement officer’s training.
While there are many facts that are not included in the cnn.com news article about the Danziger 7, there are indications that one of the men who were killed (one of the two decedents), was not armed, and was even shot in the back.
As these officers face pending criminal charges, they could potentially be facing civil liability as well. The families of the decedents and the survivors may have viable claims against the police department and the officers for the deprivation of constitutional civil rights and for excessive force.
Stories like these are very unfortunate because while law enforcement officers deserve the utmost respect in our society, the United States Constitution recognizes certain rights which may not be violated by peace officers.
We’ll keep an eye on this story.
