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13 days agoThat’s a fair point, but I do have a question: How often does that office actually discipline the police? Do you expect there to be a serious question of whether the shooter in this instance did wrong by firing in an environment where they did not know whether their firing line was clear?
Because we in the US have rules that move investigations of police to other policing organizations and sometimes to civilian oversight boards, and the value of that is limited, because those organizations are themselves corrupted.
I think where we’re different is that your oversight seems to actually punish police. Even when ours is supposed to be independent, the politicians that appoint the overseers are chosen because the police won’t complain. It may be the unionization that enables that level of power or the general copaganda/crime panics prevalent in our society, but the review agencies are frequently toothless.
On this case, the criticism is not that they should have seen a person in their line of sight, it’s that they fired in a direction where they didn’t know with reasonable certainty who was in the line of fire. Shooting in the direction of the building with rounds that can penetrate the walls/doors introduces a risk of just this outcome.