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Comment by fooey | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, they've been charging protesters who throw tear gas back at the police with assault with a deadly weapon

Because the hypocrisy of American policing wasn't obvious enough already.

> He also was arrested for what police say was “assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer” and resisting or obstructing an officer. The deadly weapon apparently was a tear gas canister that police tossed toward him and other protesters and alleged he tossed back in their direction.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/06/06/protester-recounts-ge...

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Are the police legally allowed to assault protesters "with a deadly weapon"? Otherwise, it seems like a countersuit would be in order. "Police claim they were assaulted, therefore they admit to assaulting us."

Is this really a question? Police are allowed to fire rubber bullets at you. Tasers. Pepper spray. You name it, they have lots of tools to use against citizens that are completely illegal for citizens to use right back.

That is not correct — it is illegal for anyone to attack you unprovoked, even a police officer. Without cause, they are not allowed to fire rubber bullets at you, nor are they allowed to tase or pepper spray you.

The only reason they get away with it is that they are unwilling to enforce the law against themselves.

And Qualified Immunity protects them from civil action.

As a concept qualified immunity makes sense. The police are expected to do things which would get any other citizen sued or put in jail. So a certain amount of immunity for these actions makes perfect sense. The problem is that it has become an impenetrable shield behind which clear wrongdoing goes unpunished. We probably don't want to eliminate qualified immunity, but we need to drastically increase accountability so it isn't abused.

You’ve got QI kind of backwards. QI was never meant to alter what cops were allowed to do, it was supposed to shield them from nuisance suits. Think less “cops killing people” and more “suing the clerk over a denied license”. The bounds of acceptable police force is set by law and department policy, not QI. Before QI the police were still legally allowed to arrest people, after all.

The problem is that QI rulings are insanely narrow, to the point where minor differences get cops off scot free. The differences can be as minor as the difference between setting dogs on a surrendering suspect in a “wooded creek” vs. in a “shrubby ditch”. And every single time this happens, a specific precedent is denied for future incidents.

C'mon, it's not like police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens. This discussion is in the context of police in a stand-off against protesters that are pushing the line between peaceful and rioting.

You may not like their enforcement, and in some cases they are clearly going too far, but there is no real argument on the legality of the tools they are using in the situation. We gave them the right to act as the state's expression of force.

> C'mon, it's not like police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens. This discussion is in the context of police in a stand-off against protesters that are pushing the line between peaceful and rioting.

If this is your takeaway from the last two weeks, we won't be able to agree. My position is that the police are shooting rubber bullets at random citizens, and that protestors "pushing the line between peaceful and rioting" is a mostly–manufactured narrative to give them post–hoc justification for doing so.

I agree, we probably are talking past each other. I was discussing policy, you were discussing current events. It sounded like you were discussing policy but I misunderstood. Judging from the downvotes, the hive mind feels similarly to you. I'll bow out and have the policy discussion elsewhere.

I thought there was some kind of distinction, where they were required to use weapons that were "nonlethal".

Vehicles can be considered deadly weapons.

Officially? No. Practically? Yes.

Special training would be my guess at the suit defense tactic here. Police are trained to toss the item in such a way that it’s not considered assault, etc. Same reason police are allowed to use the giant screens in their cars while they’re driving.

> Because the hypocrisy of American policing wasn't obvious enough already.

Even when police are behaving exactly by the book, they are absolutely allowed to take actions that would otherwise be considered a crime when undertaken by a private citizen. It is not accidental that they are empowered with more authority than an average citizen.

There was a video from near me of a police officer punching a handcuffed man in the head multiple times.

It was deemed ok because the man spit at the officer and spitting is considered assault where I live.

Man I can only imagine what would happen to me if I beat the hell out of a guy and told the judge it was self defense becausehe spit at me.

This is a non-sequitur. Nobody disagrees that no small number of cops have been overstepping their authority. The question is should they have more authority to use force than an average citizen. Our society has answered that question in the affirmative, even if some individuals may disagree.

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