Framing police-killing verdicts on jurors’ own fear makes unlawful killing nearly indefinable.

Evidence

As Christian Werthschulte observed in a Facebook comment last night, when we read the official verdict, we see that “the jury is somehow made to ask themselves if they had felt threatened if they’d been in the shoes of the police officer in order to conclude if the killing was lawful or not. Inevitably this will lead to a ‘Oh, I would’ve been scared, too!’ reaction.” This is both absurd and terrifying, given the amount of sub-machine guns that Met officers carry around London. If the question posed to juries in such cases is going to be “might you, an ordinary member of the public, have been scared”, then it’s hard to see what would ever constitute an unlawful killing. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1748

Categorization

• SEED: A tight analytical frame — the legal structure of the ‘reasonable fear’ test — for an essay on how policing accountability is designed to fail.
• XREF: Connects to the broader Fisher theme of state killing and ‘reality management’; also parallels arguments about qualified immunity’s reasonableness standard in US policing debates. — connects to: An ordinary-reaction test for police shootings makes unlawful killing nearly undefinable — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1748; Legal immunity for subjective fear licenses deadly force in public spaces. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 1209

Broader Connections

• An ordinary-reaction test for police shootings makes unlawful killing nearly undefinable #corroborates (0.92) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1748
• Legal immunity for subjective fear licenses deadly force in public spaces. #corroborates (0.80) — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1209