good morning.  It used to be, at least in my perceptions, that the use of lethal force by law enforcement required an unambiguous lethal threat—not just the presence of a weapon in hostile hands, but firing it also.  A police officer was authorized to kill only in defense of his life, period.  Officers who killed unarmed men were at minimum no longer cops, and sometimes went to jail whether they were good men or not.  It was one of the many risks you accepted, and which set you apart from other professions, as a cop.  Sometime in the last twenty years we have lowered that standard.

Of police officers who have fired their guns, some were killed by their assailants, some were badly wounded and maimed for life and clearly only survived by killing their would-be murderers.  But back when I was still innocent, it was very rare that a cop left a gunfight with a uniform clean and unbloodied. 

I once saw police officers as manifestations of a benevolent society, where human life was held sacred regardless of the human form it took.  Law enforcement once upon a time required it's officers to enter the zone in which their death was not just possible but likely, and required them to exhaust every alternative, before permitting them to fire on another person. 

 there was a time when our society—our juries and our politicians—required police officers to bear the burden of their own mistakes.  And in that time, the killing of an innocent unarmed man by four cops would have resulted in four ex-cops and four manslaughter convictions.  Today, it is a brave new world. 

God help us.

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