In the second installment of the Naked Gun series, which parodied police films, officer Frank Drebin is invited to the White House, where President George H.W. Bush fetes him for having killed 1,000 drug dealers.
“I should point out,” Drebin concedes, “the last two I backed over with my car. Luckily, they turned out to be drug dealers.”
I’ve been thinking of that line a lot recently as the national debate over police use of force rages on. One recurring excuse involves digging up stories about the past criminal record of a victim of police misconduct to try and suggest that they really had it coming.
Even in the case of George Floyd, in which most people acknowledge the police used unjustified force, there have been people pushing out stories about his criminal background. Bob Kroll, the president of the Minneapolis police union, complained in a letter to his members that “what is not being told is the violent criminal history of George Floyd. The media will not air this.”
On Tuesday, President Trump tweeted out a conspiracy theory in an attempt to suggest that the 75-year-old protester thrown to the ground by police in Buffalo, New York, essentially had it coming because he “could be an ANTIFA provocateur.”
This is not how this is supposed to work, however. We are a country of laws and due process. There’s a reason why cops are supposed to get a warrant before searching private property. They aren’t supposed to break down doors randomly without cause to go on fishing expeditions in people’s homes in the hopes of finding something.
If Floyd deserved to be arrested, the police could have done it without putting a knee to his neck for nearly nine minutes as he struggled to breathe. Regardless of whether the Buffalo protester was an “agitator,” multiple officers should be able to deal with an unarmed elderly man without throwing him to the ground with enough force that blood was visibly flowing from his head as he was knocked out cold.
Law enforcement, in other words, can’t do whatever they want and then hope they somehow get “lucky” after the fact if it turns out that, at some point, the person whose basic rights they violated turns out to have some sort of criminal history.
