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I have been thinking about the likely results of "zero black deaths at the hands of police" as a policy goal. https://twitter.com/SenWarren/status/1300410870997159937
First of all, the desire in itself is good. All of these deaths are sad, all of the lives lost are valuable, but people are capable of "throwing away their own lives," for example by trying to kill someone else, the point of disagreement is whether police killings are such cases.
It seems that liberals are asking for a higher bar for the use of deadly force, beyond the current "reasonable suspicion" standard. An officer can't just worry that someone is reaching for a gun, perhaps the gun would have to be pointed and fired before firing back is justified.
First likely consequence: arresting potentially violent suspects becomes much riskier for cops, cops either change their behavior or die on the job more frequently. The change in behavior is what liberals want here, so this consequence doesn't bother them.
Second likely consequence: it becomes widely known that if you can fight off the cops without pulling a gun on them, they have to just let you go. More people will try to fight off the cops, knowing the consequences for doing so are low.
Perhaps letting someone run away is what we want to see, why not just come back and arrest him later? This might not be a problem in most cases, but in some percentage of cases, the escaped arrestee might kill or rape someone after escaping. So, more preventable crimes occur.
Can we use non-forceful incentives to make people more likely to submit to arrest? Say for example, an automatic fine or jail penalty for people who escape from cops? I believe this would only increase the incentive to keep trying to get away.
That is all a long way of saying that I believe the policy changes that would get us to "zero black people killed by police" would mean it would be much harder to arrest violent people, so violence would become more common.
This all seems very basic and obvious to me, but perhaps it is because I am indoctrinated with a liberal theory of the state's monopoly on violence, at any rate please let me know if you think I am getting something wrong.
