Saturday, September 26, 2020

Who's at Fault?

 What happened to Breonna Taylor was a tragedy that shouldn't have happened.  Who was responsible is the bigger question.

It is easy to fault the officer's who were executing the warrant, but they weren't really responsible.  They may not have properly announced themselves, uncertain, but once they breached the door and were fired upon they were going to return fire.  

The boyfriend who returned fire was also not responsible.  If he didn't know it was the police he had the right to defend himself.  

The problems actually were more entwined in the system and displays what is a common flaw in many systems.  Many items become routine and because of that result in shortcuts.  I can pretty much guarantee that cut and paste results in many requests and official documents end up with identical language in at least part of the form.

This isn't just laziness, it is because staffing doesn't allow the type of preparation that would be required.

In this case the warrants were essentially identical and while not perfect were good enough to get approved.

Most of the time the system sort of works.

In this instance it didn't.

The police who got caught up in it are the instruments not the cause.

No comments:

Post a Comment