OPINION:
Protesters, this time in St. Louis, have once again rioted following the acquittal of a white police officer for the 2011 shooting of a black drug dealer during a high-speed car chase. The officer, charged with murder, was acquitted after a lengthy investigation and bench trial.
It is ironic that the St. Louis protests occurred on Constitution Day — the 230th anniversary of the approval of the Constitution by the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. The riots give us reason to look at what this unique document has to say about policing and the rule of law.
Police are the government officers most often encountered by Americans. They are, in that regard, Americans’ first defenders of the rule of law — the single most important factor that preserves and maintains a free, just and civil society. In countless cultures and countries, the police have been and many still are the tool of dictators and tyrants, abusing the citizenry at will and without restraint. But since its ratification in 1788, the United States Constitution and the body of law that has developed from it, American citizens are protected from abuse and unreasonable behavior by the police, and provided with access to a (mostly) fair and reasonable system of justice. Where abuses have occurred — and to be sure, there have been many abuses — they have largely been corrected by the courts, often in cases that have forever strengthened the law protecting citizens.
Use of force is a necessary and crucial component of policing. A Bureau of Justice Statistics study reports that approximately 44 million Americans had some sort of face-to-face contact with police each year between 2002 and 2011, and that about 700,000 of those experienced the threat of or actual use of force by the officer. No doubt each one of those threats or actual use of force was a little different, and different calculations went into the determination, on the part of the officer, whether to threaten, whether to actually use force, and if so how much force and with what sort of instrument — be it a nightstick, Taser, pepper spray, simply a hand or a handgun — should be used.
Contrary to the beliefs and accusations of the St. Louis protesters and their many sympathizers, the use of force is not something taken lightly by any law enforcement officer, and it is highly regulated. Originating with the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, which protects citizens from unlawful searches and seizures, a large body of law has developed that dictates what police can and cannot do.
In crafting that body of law, the courts have carefully balanced the interests of the police and the public against the rights of those arrested or against whom force might be threatened or used. In addition, many jurisdictions have developed their own sets of standards, some stricter than the established law, which provide guidelines for their own departments.
The principle case, Graham v. Connor, was handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1989. The court concluded that each time an officer uses force is unique, and that the officer must almost always make an instant decision, based on many factors, on whether to use force. If he does, the court ruled that the officer has wide discretion in how to proceed. “The reasonableness of a particular use of force,” the court concluded, “must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight. The calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments — in circumstances that are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving — about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation. The test of reasonableness is not capable of precise definition or mechanical application.”
President Trump has yet to say anything about the St. Louis riots. The Washington Post, never short of something negative to say about the president, charges that “Trump’s silence seems to confirm that Trump does not care about the challenges affecting black Americans.” More likely the president’s silence indicates that a police officer is presumptively innocent, and deemed innocent when he has been acquitted. Mr. Trump will also have recognized that if the police are presumptively guilty, the people who’ll suffer most are the African-Americans whose lives are most at risk from violence.
The judge in the St. Louis case, in a carefully crafted 30-page opinion, examined the facts and applied the law and concluded that, pursuant to the rule of law, there was insufficient evidence to convict the officer of murder. Despite what the St. Louis protesters say, Americans should want it no other way.
• Alfred S. Regnery is chairman of the Law Enforcement Action Network and served in the Reagan Justice Department.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.