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 Originally Posted by Poopadoop
It's pretty obvious it takes two things to make a criminal: A law, and someone who breaks that law. Trying to shift the blame around so that it falls only on one or the other party is wrong. It's both the law and the person who breaks it who are responsible, full stop.
The Law isn't the foundation of morality (which is a slippery concept to begin with); it's based on it. Sometimes the Law gets things wrong. I think everyone can agree on those things as well.
When the Law does get things wrong, people have a moral duty to fight it. But why should that fight be waged solely on the Law's terms (i.e., legally)?
Sometimes legal options aren't productive. In that case, your best strategy is to make upholding the law so costly to the state that they have no choice but to change it. The fact that men like Ghandi and MLK had huge numbers of supporters who were also willing to break the law was what gave their movements weight and effected legal change.
Were all those people bad for breaking the law? I don't think so. Would they have had the same success through strictly legal means? Seems unlikely.
In terms of philosophy and Criminal Justice policy this is a good post to read over, so much so that I want to add to this.
IIRC MLK made a now famous letter from the Birmingham Alabama Jail, when some people called him out for not trying to change Jim Crow laws on entirely legal terms and strictly through the courts, and instead tried to do it on then "illegal" terms, which because of him are now legal today.
The letter is best summed up by these two sentences as a description of it.
"The letter defends the strategy of nonviolent resistance to racism. It says that people have a moral responsibility to break unjust laws and to take direct action rather than waiting potentially forever for justice to come through the courts."
We have plenty of problems with our Criminal Justice system in this country, whether you yourself are a Cop supporter, or BLM protester.
BLM, for all the condescension and even being called a "terrorist group" has a main motive in mind "Hold Police accountable for their actions".
Right now, based on killing, after killing, after killing, of a Black person by a Police officer, it is pretty much seen in the public eye that Cops can kill Black people, with outright, legal impunity, and extremely rarely, are ever held accountable for their actions, and with only some exceptions, like Michael Slager, requiring overwhelming evidence against them before they are brought upon charges.
Jury, after jury, after jury, will automatically give a presumption of innocence to a Police officer if they're accused of a wrongful killing. An ordinary citizen on the other hand, is afforded no presumption of innocence, but a presumption of guilt, even under the exact same circumstances as the Police officer. There are certain segments of American Society, particularly the ones who qualify as Jury members in a pool of potential jurors (usually they are never Black people), who will buy into the idea that if you bear a uniform and a firearm, you are automatically not guilty of any crime you're accused of.
Jon Oliver, just the other day, did a piece on "Police Accountability" and how our system, on multiple levels, will always, and consistently, fail to hold bad police officers accountable for their actions. While I was earning my degree, I learned that if you're a bad police officer, and about to be fired by your police department for making incredibly incompetent decisions on the job, resign. Once you resign, you don't gain the status of "fired". If you resign, you can still sign up for the multitude of mostly small police agencies (there are 18,000 police agencies supposedly in the United States alone, compared to Australia which has 1 Police agency) and still gain work, even if you're incredibly bad at the job of police officer. Jon Oliver's piece described one cop who was found with half a 5th of Rye Whiskey in his patrol car, and a baggie of weed and pills, who had worked for 9 different police agencies in 9 years, when threatened with a drug test said "I'm not taking no drug test, I guess I'll resign".
These cops are known among Law Enforcement, as "Gypsy Cops", in that they move from agency, to agency, to agency, until they are threatened from being fired from each one. And one way a Gypsy Cop has impacted your news feed on facebook, was the Cop who killed Tamir Rice (who coincidentally, was not brought up on charges by the Cleveland Prosecutor) who was deemed too incompetent for the role of police officer in his prior agency, before he was hired by Cleveland's Police Department.
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