I was listening to a radiolab podcast (I know I know) the other day about the federal legal standard used to justify police use of force. The thesis of the episode was that it stems from the supreme court case Graham v. Connor which basically established that use of force is justified if a reasonable police officer would have acted the same way, in the moment where force was used.

Let's take five seconds to unpack this:

How do you determine what a reasonable police officer would do? Why, you ask all of his cop buddies and crime experts, of course! But if that wasn't bad enough, the legal test stipulates that judgment must only be made at the exact moment where force was used. Did the perp reach for a gun? An object in their pocket? Then the cop was justified because in that moment they feared for their life. It doesn't matter if the cop provoked the suspect or could have de-escalated (by not engaging, for example).

It's not surprising that such a standard is applied. It's peak white supremacist america to just rip shit out of context and look at everything in a vacuum, as if causality doesn't exist. It's the same fucking reason why edgelords pretend to act surprised when they post signs everywhere saying "it's okay to be white" and anyone calls them out. It also plays into elevating cops to a higher class than the rest of us by allowing their actions to be judged solely in the moment, but when a crime is committed we look to motives and CONTEXT to enhance a sentence.

I mean isn't strange how Kyle Rittenhouse walked off even though he was also illegally possessing a firearm and walked towards the police with it, after shots had been fired nearby and people were screaming that he was the shooter? Why wasn't he shot and killed on the spot? The officers surely would've been safe to say that at any of many moments their lives felt threatened, thereby justifying lethal force. Why could that possibly be?