Given todays society, are police more inclined to shoot first and ask questions later?
It is true that as a society we have moved from zip guns to machine guns, resulting in a heightened sense of fear that what might have been a matter of some injury years ago might mean death today. We are not, however, better served by accepting the notion of “shoot first and ask questions later.” I believe, in the long run, we will be better served as a society if we insist that police adhere to job-description limitations that authorize investigation and apprehension, leaving to another component the job of deciding guilt, determining and executing punishment. What could possibly cause police officers to brutalize unarmed suspects? How much of this problem is related to drugs, to personality problems among cops themselves, to police fear of the “other”-anyone not like them? It is impossible to determine how much of our problem of police brutality is attributable to drug laws, as opposed to some personality shortcoming on the part of those who police us. One thing seems clear: our dru
