The Chokehold Comes After A Lethal Move
Simple Justice comments on the NYPD killing of Eric Garner. Apparently, choke holds have been forbidden by New York police policy for a long time now, though they've been used a lot since then, and with hardly any repercussions for the offending officers.
I commented:
The death penalty is the bottom line of every single law on the books, including jaywalking. They usually won't kill you right away, but refuse to show up in court, or to pay the fine, and they'll send a cop to arrest you. Refuse to go along quietly, and he will use force to subdue you. Resist and his force will escalate. Appear to be about to resist effectively, and he will kill you. At no point will the cop ever back down. He, and only he, turns the legislative process into "law". Otherwise, we could ignore much of it.
Display sufficient contempt for a cop, and he may decide to short-circuit the process above and switch immediately to the death penalty. He has very little motivation to hold back, other than the humanity that his training and experience tend to beat out of him. He will rarely be punished for violence, until we the people decide to stop allowing it.
Most of don't need the law. We don't hurt people and we don't steal their stuff. But statutes criminalize a whole lot of activity nowadays that shouldn't be anybody's business (every drug statute, every gun statute, every tax statute, every licensing and registration statute). Law enforcement is the only thing that turns statutes that we would laugh at into laws that we must obey, on penalty of death.
