Thoughts on hiring people to be violent

So once again a white on-duty police officer has killed an unarmed, mostly-innocent black man, in violation of his own department's policies, and will face no criminal charges; it's not clear whether he will receive any negative feedback from his employer, or will be subject to a civil suit.

Part of the issue is race, of course -- this kind of thing seems to keep happening with white officers and black civilians. But there's a larger problem which would remain even if there were no racial angle.

One of the qualities of a State, in libertarian terms, is "a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence." Our society routinely hires people to exercise that "legitimate use of violence": soldiers, executioners, jailers, police officers. All of these people are expected to do, as part of their job descriptions, things that would normally be criminal offenses, because they're allegedly acting not as individuals but as representatives of the State. If these people were held to the exact same standards as ordinary civilians, they couldn't do their jobs and nobody with any sense would accept such a job.

But our problem right now is the opposite: we've hired people to be violent on behalf of the State, and effectively immunized them from any personal responsibility for their actions on duty; we've given them individual discretion far exceeding their training and mandate.

One expects the severity of the action to be correlated with the strictness of the procedures. An executioner, in killing people, has to follow a very precise script, after a procedure of months or years has allegedly established guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. A jailer isn't supposed to kill people at all, but can use violence to keep people in captivity, again after a lengthy legal procedure. A soldier, in killing people, obviously doesn't have time for all that "in the field"; the person to be killed is decided to be a legitimate target in a matter of seconds by virtue of appearance, physical location (in a war zone, outside the U.S.), and (perhaps) the appearance of posing an immediate threat. A police officer applies basically all the same criteria, except that the people to be harmed or killed are inside the U.S. and (mostly) citizens, so there are stricter standards: a police officer is supposed to follow legal procedures (which frankly can be pretty complex), while still making decisions in a matter of seconds. And a police officer isn't hired to kill people, but only to use that as a rare last resort. [Note the remarkable similarity between a police officer and a soldier. I'll get back to this.]

I suspect that there's no objectively "right" answer, only a continuum of unsatisfactory compromises. People with a right-wing mind set of "it's a tough world out there, and it takes a tough man unfettered by bureaucracy to get the job done" will prefer one end of the spectrum, while those with a left-wing mind set of "we're a nation of laws, not of men; people's rights should be taken from them only after commensurate due process" will prefer the other end of the spectrum.

However, as I was thinking through this post, I mused "police officers need guns and some individual discretion in order to do their jobs," and shalmestere said "Like in England, where the police don't routinely carry guns?"

Even civilians may under some circumstances be permitted violence, mostly in defending themselves or others from immediate danger. But (except in "stand your ground" states) they're expected to use no more force than necessary, to take reasonable measures to avoid confrontation, to call the cops if possible rather than confronting bad guys directly, etc. Come to think of it, these are all things that we'd like to expect of police too.

I suspect that in many countries, police officers don't think of themselves as "soldiers with stricter rules of engagement," but rather as "civilians with a special duty." Not "trained killers minus some of their discretion," but "good neighbors plus some extra trust."